Anil Ambani Firm Sues The Wire for Rs 6,000 Crore for Video Show on Rafale deal

New Delhi: News website The Wire has been sued by the Anil Ambani Group-led Reliance Infrastructure for a whopping Rs 6,000 crore for a recent video show on the controversial Rafale deal.

The video talk show, titled ‘Rafale Deal: Understanding the Controversy’, was uploaded on August 23, 2018, and entailed a discussion among three panelists -- senior defence journalist Ajai Shukla, The Wire’s M.K. Venu and national security expert Happymon Jaocb.

Confirming the development on its website, the news website said the civil lawsuit had been filed against The Wire’s founding editors and Shukla, as also The Wire’s office manager, “who plays no decision-making role on either the editorial or business side of the organisation.”  The hearing on the suit has been listed November 27 in the Ahmedabad civil court.

The news website, which embedded the said video in a news report on the lawsuit on Monday, said it “was a rational and informed debate on whether the process by which the Modi government acquired 36 Rafale jets was transparent in nature.”

According to The Wire, the discussion was “balanced and debated “how the deal changed at the eleventh hour and whether Reliance Infrastructure’s track record was taken into consideration by Dassault when it chose the company as an offset partner.”

Suing the website, the Reliance Group and Anil Ambani termed the statements made during the discussion as “wholly incorrect and misleading, made with a deliberate pre-determined motive to harm and injure the reputation” of both the company and its chairman.

In a news report in The Wire, Siddharth Varadarajan, one among the three founding editors of the news website, said the “latest case by the Anil Ambani-led company is an attempt to silence the media and discourage journalists from asking questions about the Rafale deal,” adding that “We will not be deterred by such tactics.” 

The Wire said it would contest the suit.