New Delhi: The Delhi high court on Tuesday directed activist Saket Gokhale to delete alleged defamatory tweets against former diplomat Lakshmi Murdeshwar Puri. Gokhale had earlier told the court he was unwilling to delete the tweets.
In an interim order, Justice C. Hari Shankar also restrained Gokhale from posting scandalous tweets against Lakshmi Puri and her husband Union minister Hardeep Singh Puri during the pendency of the defamation suit.
The court said if Gokhale fails to delete the tweets within 24 hours of passing of the order, Twitter shall identify the URLs and take necessary action.
The court passed the order on a defamation suit filed by Lakshmi Puri seeking Rs 5 crore damages from Gokhale and a direction that he deletes the tweets.
She alleged that in the tweets, Gokhale has made false and factually incorrect, per-se defamatory, slanderous and libellous statements/imputations against her and her family.
The court also issued a summons to Gokhale on the main suit and directed him to file his written statement within four weeks and listed the case before the Joint Registrar on September 10.
Earlier too, Justice Hari Shankar had pulled up Gokhale for his tweets. “How can you be vilifying people like this. Knock off these things from the website,” he said. “If you have a problem with the public functionaries, you must go to them first.”
In her suit, Lakshmi Puri, who had served as a former assistant secretary-general in the United Nations, alleged that tweets are “maliciously motivated and designed accordingly, laced with canards and entail deliberate twisting of facts”.
The case pertains to the tweets posted by the RTI activist last month (on June 13 and 26) which raised questions over a property purchased by Lakshmi Puri in Switzerland and expressed doubts over the assets of the Puri couple. According to Gokhale, Lakshmi Puri’s assets surpass what was declared by her husband, Hardeep Singh Puri, in his election affidavit. Tagging finance minister Nirmala Sitaraman, he pressed for an Enforcement Directorate inquiry against the couple.
Lakshmi Puri submitted to the court that the debt incurred in purchasing the property (apartment) concerned was still being serviced and that she had duly informed her employer regarding the same at the relevant time. According to her, when she had decided to purchase the apartment in 2005, it was priced at 16,00,000 Swiss Franc and a sum of 6,00,000 CHF had become available to her from her daughter, a senior vice president with an international investment bank, in two tranches. The remainder of the amount was borrowed from a bank and is still being serviced, her submission to court stated.
(With PTI inputs)
Note: An earlier version of this story said Lakshmi Puri served as an assistant secretary general in the “United States”. It is actually the United Nations.