The court proceedings involving Jay Shah and The Wire will indeed be one of the most keenly-watched legal battles. That is, if Shah’s defamation complaint is admitted in the court of law.

Yesterday, October 11, was supposed to be the first day of the hearing. But Shah’s lawyer SV Raju didn’t turn up and the hearing was deferred to October 16.

Meanwhile, 101 Reporters got a copy of Shah’s complaint, which elaborates on his beef with The Wire’s story and its editors.

The criminal defamation complaint filed by BJP national president Amit Shah’s son against journalist Rohini Singh and The Wire’s editors and management seeks that they should be convicted under Sections 500 (defamation), Section 120 B (criminal conspiracy) and Section 109 (abetment) of the Indian Penal Code. According to IPC provisions, the punishment under Section 500 is imprisonment for a maximum of two years.

The 22-page complaint was filed by Shah on October 9 in a metropolitan magistrate court in Ahmedabad in Gujarat where he resides and has his businesses.

The complaint, while liberally using the words defamatory and defamation, claims The Wire’s piece is a “well-thought out, well-planned and well-executed conspiracy against the complainant and other dignitaries mentioned in the defamatory article…”

It further calls the report “…scandalous, frivolous, misleading, derogatory, libelous and consisting of several defamatory statements…” The complaint starts off by listing Shah’s achievements — “the complainant enjoys excellent reputation in society in general and the business community in particular, being a self-made and honest businessman…” It states that Shah is a “young, independent and educated”.

The complaint seeks to establish a “malafide” intent behind The Wire’s story by alleging Singh sent a questionnaire to Shah at 1 am on October 6 and sought a response on the same day. It also states that the questions were sent “from an unknown email address and was addressed with a generic subject line ‘Questions’ leading to a strong possibility of the email actually getting delivered to the Spam folder…”

The complaint says that while the story mentions Jitendra Shah, one of the listed directors of Temple Enterprises, it did not seek any reply from him. Commenting on the article image, the complaint states that “an unconnected photograph of the marriage reception of the complainant with the Hon’ble Prime Minister and Shri Amit Shah (the father of the complainant and the President of Bharatiya Janata Party, a political party in India) is published along with the complainant in a crude and malafide attempt highlighting the pre-planned conspiracy of the accused to defame the complainant…”

Commenting on the details listed in the story, the complaint says that “though the profit/loss for the financial year (FY) 2012-13, FY 2013-14 and FY 2014-15 is highlighted but deliberately the profit/loss for FY 2015-16 is not highlighted correspondingly since the accused were aware that the complainant suffered a loss in the concerned company to the tune of approximately Rs 1.5 crore….”

It also states that Shah will be seeking compensation under provisions of Section 357 of the Criminal Procedure Code, in addition to recovering costs and damages from the accused by way of “appropriate civil proceedings.”

Interestingly, the complaint states that journalists “do not enjoy any special status regarding defamation” and to substantiate this claim it uses the 1981 Supreme Court order in the case against the Mumbai-based Blitz.

101Reporters perused this order and found that the SC dismissed the appeal filed by a complainant who alleged defamation and further says that the publication reported with due care and attention and was “acting for the public good”.

(Note: The complaint has a few missing pages: 3, 14, 16, 17 and 20. These pages pertain to achievements of Shah, excerpts from The Wire article and statements of Jaimin Shah and Vipul Shukla — the witnesses who contacted Shah regarding the defamatory article published.)

When 101Reporters contacted Siddharth Varadarajan, founding editor of The Wire, he said that he was yet to receive a copy of the complaint filed. When asked that the complaint alleges that many “crucial” parts from the reply sent by Shah’s lawyer were omitted in The Wire article, he said, “The reply (they sent) is as long as the original article. These people should have some education about what journalism is and what is democracy before they file such silly cases,” he said. When asked about the point that the complaint makes of Singh’s questions being deliberately marked vaguely, he said, “The facts of the case is that they got our questions and they replied. So what is this song and dance about?”

(Nivedita Niranjankumar is a Bengaluru based freelance writer and a member of 101Reporters.com, a pan-India network of grassroots reporters.)

The author can be contacted on Twitter @Nive_nk