Team News Riveting
Mumbai, December 14
Suspended Senior IPS officer Param Bir Singh on Wednesday unconditionally withdrew the defamation suit filed against Republic TV Editor-in-Chief Arnab Goswami and ARG Outlier Media, owner of the channel.
Singh had filed the suit claiming that the channel had showed Singh in bad light in its reportage of the alleged fake Television Rating Points (TRP) scam and sought damages to the tune of Rs 90 lakh. Goswami filed an application seeking rejection of the plaint under Order VII Rule 11 of the Code of Civil Procedure last week. The same was served on Singh for his reply.
The application was listed for hearing today, when Singh submitted that he wanted to withdraw the suit. Advocate Pradeep Gandhy appearing for Goswami, however, stated that such a withdrawal should not be presumed as a settlement of the matter.
He also pointed out that due to the pendency of such matters at the behest of Singh, there was harassment to Goswami and hence imposing costs was important. The court of City Civil Judge VD Kelkar imposed costs of Rs 1,500 to be payable directly to Goswami.
Earlier, in a detailed response to the suit, Goswami had stated that the suit was not maintainable especially in light of the fact that the plaintiff is no more the Police Commissioner.
Goswami contended that the suit had been filed by Singh in his capacity as Commissioner and since he no longer held that post, Singh has no cause of action against Goswami and his channel. In light of this the suit should be rejected and dismissed with costs, he pleaded.
The TRP scam came to light when the Crime Branch of Mumbai Police through certain employees of the Hansa Group, found that ‘sampling metering services’ were being manipulated by paying people to watch particular TV channels.
A chargesheet was filed in November 2020 alleging that Republic TV channels had benefitted from the scam and had tampered its viewership numbers to procure more revenue.
