Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, accused of defaming Adani, is facing arrest. Why?

Thursday, 21 January 2021Newsdesk

On January 19, a court in Kutch, Gujarat, issued an arrest warrant for journalist and author Paranjoy Guha Thakurta in a defamation suit filed by the Adani Group, one of India’s leading corporate houses.According to PTI, judicial magistrate Pradeep Soni pronounced that Thakurta was charged under Section 500 of the Indian Penal Code, and ordered the police in Delhi’s Nizamuddin, where the seasoned editor lived when the complaint was filed in 2017, to "arrest the said accused and to produce him before me".

New Delhi, 21 January 2021

The case dates back to June 2017 when Thakurta, then editor of the Economic and Political Weekly, co-wrote a report explaining how the Narendra Modi government’s tweaking of special economic zone rules had led to the Adani Group reaping a benefit of Rs 500 crore.In January that year, he had co-written another report on the Adani Group, headlined “Did Adani Group Evade Rs 1,000 Crore in Taxes?”.Though the reports questioned the government’s actions, it was the Adani Group which sent a legal notice to EPW and filed a defamation suit against the authors alleging that their reports were defamatory and harmful to its reputation.This caused the board of the Sameeksha Trust, which runs the EPW, to take down the June 2017 report, prompting Thakurta to resign as the editor. The censored article was republished by the Wire, inviting an injunction from the Adani Group.

Source -newslaundry.com