A Delhi court on Thursday quashed a lower court’s order restraining four journalists from publishing allegedly defamatory material about industrialist Gautam Adani’s Adani Enterprises, Live Law reported.

On September 6, Special Civil Judge Anuj Kumar Singh of the Rohini Courts had temporarily restrained journalists Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, Ravi Nair, Abir Dasgupta, Ayaskant Das and Ayush Joshi, and the websites paranjoy.in, adaniwatch.org and adanifiles.com.au from publishing allegedly defamatory reports about the flagship company of the Adani Group.

District Judge Ashish Aggarwal of the Rohini Courts passed the order on Thursday on an appeal filed by Nair, Dasgupta, Das and Joshi.

Earlier in the day, another judge of the court reserved its judgement on a plea filed by Thakurta against the gag order, Bar and Bench reported.

Aggarwal observed that the articles had been in the public domain for a long time and therefore, the civil judge should have heard the journalists before directing them to take down the content.

It may not be feasible to restore articles that have been removed if the court finds them not to be defamatory after hearing the journalists, Live Law quoted the judge as saying.

“Therefore in my opinion the trial court should have decided the prayers made by the plaintiff after giving hearing opportunity to the defendants,” the bench said. “The impugned order is not sustainable.”

Advocate Vrinda Grover, representing the journalists, asked why no notice was issued before the court passed the retraining order.

“Why no notice even of two days or three days?” Bar and Bench quoted Grover as having asked the bench. “The court would have had the benefit of hearing us…The company which runs one of the largest media houses in the country says it ran into these articles just now?”

The court had on September 6 passed the injunction in favour of Adani Enterprises, directing the defendants to expunge the material from their articles and social media posts. If expunging the content was not feasible, they must remove it within five days, the order had said.

However, the court had clarified that it was not issuing a blanket order restraining the defendants from “fair, verified and substantiated” reporting and from hosting, storing or circulating such articles, posts or webpage links.

The matter pertained to a defamation suit filed by Adani Enterprises alleging that journalists, activists and organisations had damaged the company’s reputation and cost its stakeholders billions of dollars.

Centre’s take down order

Citing the September 6 order, the Union government had on Tuesday directed 12 news outlets and independent journalists to take down allegedly defamatory content about Adani Enterprises.

Among those who got notices to remove such content were news portals Newslaundry, The Wire and HW News, journalists Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, Ajit Anjum and Ravish Kumar, satirist Akash Banerjee and content creator Dhruv Rathee.

The ministry ordered 138 YouTube links and 83 Instagram posts to be removed. These included not just investigative reports, but also satirical videos and incidental mentions of the Adani Group.

The Editors Guild of India on Wednesday said it was deeply concerned about the court’s September 6 order and the Union government’s directive to remove YouTube links and social media posts about the firm.

The guild said that such developments were a step towards censorship and undermined freedom of speech.

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