CHENNAI : The Madras High Court has quashed a six-year-old defamation case against Tamil magazine ‘India Today’ by the State government observing that it is the duty of the Press to recollect information of events in the past for the public’s benefit.
Justice PN Prakash, in his verdict last week, observed that if the Press is gagged, democracy in the country will be in utter peril. The case pertains to an article published in the magazine in 2012 on removal of a minister. The city public prosecutor filed a case against the magazine accusing it of defaming the State government by publishing the article.
Rejecting the arguments made by State government’s counsel, the judge said in the order “Even on a reading of the entire article, this Court is not able to draw such an inference as argued by the learned Public Prosecutor and further, it is not open to this Court to strain the language employed in the article or to read between the lines, for arriving at such an inference.
“If the voice of the Fourth Estate is stifled in this manner, India will become a Nazi State. There may be some occasional transgressions by the press. However, in the larger interest of sustaining democracy those aberrations deserve to be ignored,” the court observed.