Delete Tweets against Lakshmi Puri, Delhi HC orders activist

The Delhi High Court has directed activist Saket Gokhale to immediately delete tweets against Lakshmi Murdeshwar Puri as the court also stopped him from posting "scandalous" tweets against her and her husband Union Minister Hardeep Singh Puri. If  Gokhale fails to follow the court's order within 24 hours, Justice C Hari Shankar said on Tuesday. Twitter will take down the posts. The court also asked Ms Puri, a former Assistant Secretary-General at the United Nations, to "implead Twitter as a party to the proceedings". 

Gokhale, in his tweets On June 13 and June 26, referred to some property purchase by Ms Puri in Switzerland while also mentioning her husband. The court passed the order on a defamation suit filed by Lakshmi Puri, seeking Rs 5 crore as damages from Gokhale and a direction that he removed the tweets. In her lawsuit, filed through Karanjawala and Company, she alleged that in the tweets, Gokhale has made "false and factually incorrect, per-se defamatory, slanderous and libelous statements/ imputations" against her and her family. 

Observing that right to reputation is recognised as a fundamental right, it had asked  Gokhale, also a freelance journalist, as to how he could "vilify people", particularly when the tweets put out by him were "prima facie incorrect". "So according to your understanding of the law, any Tom, Dick and Harry can write anything against anyone on Internet irrespective of the fact that it destroys and damages the reputation of a person," the judge had remarked. "The defendant is restrained, pending further orders of this court, from posting any defamatory, scandalous, or factually incorrect tweets on his Twitter account against the plaintiff or her husband," ths court order said.