In a land mark order, the The Bombay High Court on Wednesday imposed a fine of Rs 50 lakh on National Stock Exchange (NSE) for trying to gag journalists Sucheta Dalal and Debashis Basu by fling defamation case against them. The NSE had filed a defamation case of Rs.100crore against the journalists for publishing a series of article on the irregularity in the stock exchange in the ‘Moneylife’ magazine.
The High Court dismissed the case and asked the NSE to pay Rs1.5 lakh each to journalists Basu and Sucheta. Besides this, the court imposed a penalty of Rs47 lakh on NSE to be paid in the form of a donation to Masina Hospital and Tata Memorial Hospital in Mumbai.
“You cannot use defamation to gag the press. How is it defamation when Sucheta Dalal sent you questions before publishing the article and you (NSE) chose not to respond to the queryIJ”, observed justice Gautam Patel.
In the article, the journalists wrote about the leaking of info by certain insiders in the NSE, manipulations in the stock market. The NSE did not respond to the journalists’ queries sent before publishing. After publication, NSE filed Rs100 crore defamation suit in July.
At Wednesday’s hearing, Justice Patel said that NSE’s silence could be either arrogance or there could be an element of truth in the allegations. The Court said it “did not think” that NSE was “incapable of any missteps or wrongdoing” and that a considerable amount of transparency was required to be followed by an institution like NSE.
“If they (NSE) were really bothered about the defamation, they should have responded to our repeated queries. And if they didn’t respond, then the
lawsuit is only meant to harass us financially and gag us from writing about it,” said Sucheta, responding to the High Court order.