The Delhi Union of Journalists on Wednesday condemned the arrest warrant issued by a Gujarat court against senior journalist Paranjoy Guha Thakurta in a defamation suit filed by the Adani group.

In a statement the Delhi Union of Journalists expressed shock that a Kutch court has issued an arrest warrant against Guha Thakurta for alleged defamation of the Adani group in an article published in 2017 that said the Narendra Modi government had tweaked rules relating to a special economic zone which gave the company a “Rs 500-crore bonanza”.

Condemning the arrest warrant, the union said: “Ironically, the Adani group has withdrawn its charges against the publishers of the article and the co-authors but not Guha Thakurta. In 2017 the article that stirred controversy was published by the Economic & Political Weekly (EPW).

“It alleged that the government of India had tweaked rules of the special economic zone to enable Adani Power Limited to get duty drawback of Rs 500 crore from the government. The Adani group sent a notice to the publisher, threatening legal action. The EPW’s publisher, the Sameeksha Trust, pulled down the article and its editor Guha Thakurta resigned in protest.”

In June 2017, the statement said, The Wire news portal republished the article with permission from the EPW. “The Adani group then filed a suit on The Wire and the co-authors of the article…. In May 2019 a Gujarat court ordered the publishers to remove one sentence and one word from the article. The Wire complied and the defamation suit was rejected by the court,” the statement said.

Subsequently, the Adani group withdrew the case against The Wire and the co-authors. “In the circumstances it is strange that another court should have ordered the arrest of Guha Thakurta.”

The statement said: “The Delhi Union of Journalists severely condemns the move to arrest a leading journalist. We have long demanded decriminalisation of the defamation law that is a serious threat to media freedoms. We urge the higher judiciary to strike down the criminal defamation law at the earliest.”

Guha Thakurta could not be contacted.

The Wire said in a statement issued on Wednesday: “Paranjoy Guha Thakurta and two other authors wrote an article for the Economic and Political Weekly in 2017 on the Adani group, which was republished subsequently by The Wire.

“While the Adani group had initiated both civil and criminal defamation against the three authors and The Wire in 2017, the proceedings against The Wire and its editors were unconditionally withdrawn in 2019, as were those against two of the three authors of the article. We are dismayed to see that the case of civil and criminal defamation against Paranjoy Guha Thakurta has not been withdrawn.”