The Wire Staff 
New Delhi: Trinamool Congress Lok Sabha MP Mahua Moitra has sent legal notices to Bharatiya Janata Party MP Nishikant Dubey and advocate Jai Anant Dehadrai for making “false and defamatory allegations” against her.
Dubey had alleged in a letter to the Lok Sabha speaker on Sunday that Moitra was given “cash” and “gifts” as bribes to ask questions about the Adani Group in parliament. He claimed to have received information about this from Dehadrai.
The Union government has not responded to queries raised by Moitra and other opposition parties about allegations against the Adani Group.
The notice from Moitra was also issued to 18 media and social media platforms which reported the news, including The Wire.
The notice points out that Moitra had recently raised questions about the veracity of Dubey’s claimed educational qualifications and said that he had lied on his election affidavit. This, the notice says, had “rattled” Dubey and so he was now making these false allegations.
On Dehadrai, the notice says that Moitra and the advocate used to be close friends, but had a falling out. After that, Dehadrai allegedly “repeatedly threatened our Client [Moitra] with several vile, malicious and vulgar messages” and trespassed on her official residence and stole personal possessions, including Moitra’s dog. The legal notice says the dog was later returned. After repeated violations, Moitra had filed police complaints against Dehadrai.
Dehadrai tried to get journalists to publish false stories about Moitra, the notice says, but could not convince anyone because of the lack of evidence:
“However, soon after convincing our Client [Moitra] to withdraw the [police] Complaints dated 25 March 2023 and 23 September 2023, Noticee No. 2 [Dehadrai] immediately zapped back to old ways and continued his misguided and malicious pursuit of vendetta against our Client. Noticee No. 2 reached out to several prominent journalists and attempted to convince them to run stories based on wild, vindictive, fictitious and entirely imaginary allegations about our Client. It appears that no credible journalist responded to Noticee No. 2’s desperate attempts to malign our Client’s reputation basis unsupported and unsubstantiated allegations without even a shred of evidence.”
Since journalists could not be convinced, Dehadrai then approached the BJP and Dubey, the notice states. Dubey then went on to repeat these allegations and “did not even bother to conduct any due diligence of any kind to establish the veracity of the allegations”.
“Not only did Noticee No. 1 [Dubey] relay, endorse and exaggerate the false, baseless and per se defamatory allegations against our Client [Moitra], but also proceeded to leak the same to members of the media. Noticee No. 1 and 2 [Dehadrai] are both directly responsible for defaming and maligning the reputation and goodwill of our Client for their own respective personal and political vendettas,” the legal notice says.
The notice also makes clear that Moitra rejects the allegations made as completely baseless: “Our Client has never accepted any remuneration or cash or gift or benefit of any kind in relation to the discharge of her duties as a member of the Parliament, including but not limited to, the questions raised by her in Parliament and any suggestion to the contrary is vehemently denied by our Client.”
The notice also says that Dubey and Dehadrai have leaked private photos of Moitra after cropping them.
The notice calls upon Dubey to withdraw his letter to the speaker and all allegations, and issue a public apology to Moitra. Dehadrai has also been asked to withdraw the allegations in all communications and issue a public apology.