Delhi High Court quashes defamation case against journalist Mitali Saran, Business Standard

The Delhi High Court on Monday quashed a criminal defamation complaint against journalist Mitali Saran, Bar and Bench reported. The complaint was regarding an article published by Business Standard in which she was accused of defaming the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the mothership of the Hindu supremacist groups, including the BJP, together known as the Sangh Parivar.

Justice Suresh Kumar Kait concluded that the complainant, a lawyer by the name of Lohitaksha Shukla, wasn’t able to show that he was a person aggrieved by the article.

Aside from Saran, the complaint named the Business Standard and its editorial director, AK Bhattacharya. The article in question, titled “The long and shorts of it”, was published in 2016. Shukla had complained that it wasn’t based on facts and contained defamatory insinuations against the RSS and its members.

Specifically, he had alleged that the article accused RSS members of being oppressive to Indians, mentally disturbed, disrespectful to national symbols, practitioners of caste discrimination. Ans since he was a member of the RSS, Shukla had argued, his reputation was adversely affected by Saran’s article.

Saran and her fellow accused had challenged the complaint saying it was “an absolute abuse of process of law” and filed only to harass them.

Quashing the complaint, the court said, “In the present case the complainant has not led any evidence to establish how his reputation was harmed, or his moral or intellectual character was lowered as a result of the said article.”

The court noted while the complaint claimed he had been asked by his friends to leave the RSS as a result of the article, he didn’t bring anyone in the witness box to support this assertion. Thereby, he had failed to prove that the article brought any kind of defamation to him or that it had lowered the reputation of RSS in the eyes of his friends, the court added.