The Delhi High Court has dismissed two defamation suits filed by 1999 batch IFS officer Mahaveer Singhvi against Hindustan Times and Hindustan over two reports published in 2002, LiveLaw reported.
Justice Neena Bansal Krishna dismissed the suits and observed that the articles published in the two newspapers were not per se defamatory.
“Balancing the right of information of the public with the duty of the media of truthful reporting and the individual right of protection of his reputation, it is held that the articles which are the subject matter of the two suits, are not per se defamatory,” the court said, according to the report.
Singhvi filed the suits in 2007 seeking damages of Rs 5 crores each for loss of his reputation.
In the first suit, Singhvi was aggrieved by a report on July 19, 2002, titled “IFS probationer sacked after tapes prove misconduct.” The said suit was also filed against Vir Sanghvi and Saurabh Shukla, the then editor and the correspondent respectively.
The second suit was filed against the Hindi paper Hindustan and Mrinal Pandey and Rakesh Kumar Singh, the then editor and reporter. Singhvi was aggrieved by the article published on July 21, 2002 titled “shadi se inkar karne par adhikari ne yuvti ka jeena haram kiya”.
Singhvi claimed the articles were in violation of the norms of journalistic conduct issued by the Press Council of India. He submitted there was no truth to the reports. He argued that such a conversation never took place with any woman at any point of time.
On the HT report, the court said it was neutral reporting of an incident. About the Hindi report, it said the information was based on verified sources, noting that all which had transpired in the Union ministry had ultimately led to the discharge of Singhvi.
“It may be thus concluded that the newspaper articles have in the neutral/truthful manner simply reported the news on the basis of the information collected from the verified sources,” the court reportedly said.
It said the reports were in good faith and that the papers had merely discharged their duty of bringing news in the public domain.
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