Arvind Kejriwal versus Arun Jaitley, Subramanian Swamy against Rahul Gandhi and now Jay Shah and The Wire’s editors. They all reflect the reality behind defamation cases in India—a majority are to do with political rivalry or an attempt to curb freedom of the press and free speech. Last May, Justice Dipak Misra (who is now the Chief Justice of India) headed a bench which delivered a judgment upholding the constitutional validity of Section 499 of the IPC which criminalises defamation and provides for a jail term of upto two years. Yet, as the latest defamation suit announced, not by the litigant, but on his behalf by Union Minister Piyush Goyal shows, the issue has many grey areas.

In legal and media circles, “chilling effect” is the term used to describe the impact criminal defamation cases have on freedom of expression. Jay Shah’s threat of a Rs 100-crore suit against a fledging, non-profit news organisation certainly falls in that category, never mind the fact that his father, BJP President Amit Shah, is the second most powerful person in the country. “Defamation cases are, subject to rare exceptions, almost always a form of legal intimidation,” says senior lawyer Vivekanand Bhoi of the Bilaspur High Court. The Jay Shah story is illustrative because only one or two media outlets carried the story which was buried by the rest of the mainstream media. The Rs 100-crore liability case filed by Jay Shah in the Ahmedabad district court, in Mirzapur, against the news portal was clearly intimidatory.