A city court on Tuesday dismissed a plea of activist Medha Patkar to examine a new witness in her 2000 defamation case against Delhi Lieutenant Governor Vinai Kumar Saxena and said the judicial process couldn’t be “held hostage to such tactics”. The Narmada Bachao Andolan leader filed the case against Saxena when he headed an NGO in Gujarat for allegedly publishing a defamatory advertisement. Judicial magistrate Raghav Sharma noted that present case was pending for 24 years and the complainant had already examined all the witnesses listed at the time of filing of the complaint. “The judicial process cannot be held hostage to such tactics, especially in a case that has already been pending for over two decades,” the judge said.  Patkar, he observed, previously filed a plea to summon additional witnesses, yet she did not mention the present witness in that application.

“If this witness was truly material to her case, she would have either included them in the original list of witnesses or, at the very least, mentioned them in the earlier application for additional witness. The fact that this witness has surfaced only now, after all of the complainant’s witnesses have been examined, raises serious doubts about the genuineness of this request,” the judge said. The court said neither the complainant nor any of her witnesses referred to the witness sought to be summoned at any stage of the trial.  “If this witness was genuinely relevant, his/her name or role in the case would have been mentioned at some point during the last 24 years of proceedings. The complete absence of any reference to this witness further suggests that it is an afterthought, possibly introduced to bolster the complainant’s case artificially,” the judge said.

Patkar, said the court, further did not provide any explanation as to when, how, or under what circumstances she learnt about the witness.