Union minister M.J. Akbar on Monday filed a criminal defamation complaint against former colleague Priya Ramani who was the first among several women journalists to name the former editor in the MeToo campaign.
Akbar filed the case in the Patiala House district court in the capital on a day he returned to work at South Block. Although over a dozen women journalists have come out with testimonies, his complaint so far has been confined to Ramani who set the ball rolling.
The complaint has been filed through Karanjawala & Co, one of the leading law firms in the country.
It says that “while admitting that the Complainant has never done anything to her, the accused has intentionally put forward malicious, fabricated, and salacious imputations to harm the reputation of the Complainant”.
Ramani said in a statement that she was ready to “fight the allegations of defamation laid against me. Truth, and the absolute truth, is my only defence”.
“By instituting a case of criminal defamation against me, Mr Akbar has made his stand clear: rather than engage with the serious allegations that many women have made against him, he seeks to silence them through intimidation and harassment,” Ramani noted, expressing disappointment over him dismissing “the detailed allegations of several women as a political conspiracy”.
The defamation suit by a minister against a lone individual soon got pitched as a David-versus-Goliath face-off. More so with many mistaking the vakalatnama listing 97 lawyers as evidence of the battery of names Akbar has hired to fight his case.
Lawyer Apar Gupta explained in a tweet: “The number of lawyers listed on a vakalatnama is indicative of the size of the law firm, not the number of lawyers handling a case.” Others said it meant any one of the 97 represents the complainant, and this was a standard format.
A section of the media fraternity is trying to crowd-source funds to help Ramani and tap lawyers ready to represent her pro bono.
Ghazala Wahab, whose account Akbar had challenged, on Monday came up with her counter through an article in The Wire portal in which she posted screenshots from contemporaries at The Asian Age to cement her testimony.
Several journalists are toying with the idea of reprising a tactic used in the late 1980s when Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi sought to push through the defamation bill.
At every media conference by the Congress or any minister, journalists would get up and ask when the government would withdraw it. The bill was eventually shelved.
