GUWAHATI: A one crore defamation suit against Rajya Sabha member and former Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi and Rupa Publications has been filed by Assam Public Works (APW) president Aabhijeet Sharma, here on Thursday, at a local court.
Sharma filed the case over “misleading and defamatory statements” written against him in Gogoi’s autobiography “Justice for a Judge”.
In his petition filed in a Guwahati court, the APW chief prayed that Gogoi and the publisher be restrained from further publishing the same by a decree of permanent injunction or omitting the contentions sentences from the book.
According to Sharma, Gogoi in his book said, “At the local level, personal attack on the SCNR (State Coordinator of NRC) and veiled attacks on the judges, particularly me, by local politicians and specially by Abhijit Sharma…left us (the Bench) convinced that orders should be passed to protect (then SCNR Prateek) Hajela from undue harassment and calculated harm..."
“The Bench passed the order dated 18 October 2019 for his deputation on inter-cadre transfer to Madhya Pradesh, his home state. Subsequent events like the filing of FIRs against Hajela and other NRC officials; allegations of corruption and threats to order CBI probes besides enormous misinformation to the media and wide publicity thereof leave me convinced that the Bench was thoroughly justified in passing the rather unusual order for the inter-cadre transfer of Hajela by invoking Article 142 of the Constitution,” the book reads.
Sharma said it was nowhere mentioned that there was a security threat to Hajela, who is an IAS officer, or he (Sharma) created pressure on Gogoi to transfer Hajela to Madhya Pradesh. He also said that he never made any personal attack on Gogoi while he was serving as the CJI.
The court fixed the next hearing on June 3.
The APW has been vocal over alleged anomalies and corruption during the NRC updation process. In 2021, it filed an FIR with the police alleging Hajela manipulated family tree verification to include names of illegal migrants in the NRC list.
Hajela’s successor Hitesh Dev Sarma had also filed an FIR alleging the former had “facilitated” the inclusion of names of ineligible persons in the NRC list.