Saket Gokhale, Congress supporter and fake news spreader got the trashing of his life when Delhi High Court on Thursday slammed him for spreading fake news and for putting alleged defamatory and baseless tweets against former diplomat Lakshmi M Puri, wife of Union Minister Hardeep Singh Puri, on Twitter without any due diligence.
The Delhi High Court during the hearing asked Saket Gokhale how he could be vilifying people on baseless allegations. The Court slammed Saket Gokhale saying that before he got to the public domain he should have approached the plaintiff to make necessary clarifications. “How can you be vilifying people like this. Knock off these things from the website,” said Justice C Hari Shanker. “If you have a problem with the public functionaries, you must go to them first.”
Saket Gokhale claimed that he had a right to know information as a voter, to which the court asked him to go to the Election Commission. “Before you throw mud at someone, you must do a due diligence exercise,” pointed out the High Court.
The Delhi High Court asked whether Saket Gokhale had approached authorities to verify his claims. “If you do not have a judgment in support, tell the Court. Don’t go on tangents,” said the Delhi High Court after lawyers representing the Congress supporter failed to provide any evidence to back their claims, as reported by Bars and Benches.
Earlier, Saket Gokhale had already been served a legal notice by Lakshmi M Puri, who is currently working as a commentator on National and International Affairs and is a wife of Union Housing and Urban Affairs Minister Hardeep Singh Puri. Gokhale tried to damage her reputation as the Assistant Secretary-General at United Nations, Deputy Executive Director at United Nations Women, and Ambassador of India to Hungary and accredited to Bosnia and Herzegovina.
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Gokhale, in his series of tweets, alleged that Puri bought a house worth $2.5 million in Switzerland, with no legitimate sources of income shown by the power couple. Gokhale then donned a mathematician’s hat and concluded that the Puris could not have afforded the downpayment of CHF 5,40,000 (Rs. 4.3 crores) of the house purchased in 2006 as he claimed that the annual income of Lakshmi M Puri would have been around Rs 10-12 lakh per year.
Lakshmi Puri didn’t take kindly to Gokhale’s baseless accusations and chose to hit back as she tweeted, “Get your facts right @SaketGokhale & there is no ‘mystery’. I was an International Civil Servant from 2002 to Feb ‘18. Drew a tax free UN salary of over US $200,000 annually when I bought the apartment in Geneva. All facts declared to concerned authorities. Prepare to be sued.”
In response to his tweets, Puri had sent a legal notice through her lawyers seeking immediate removal of these tweets. The notice also sought an apology from Gokhale and an undertaking that the same would not be repeated, as reported by TFI.
After hearing both sides, the Delhi High Court reserved the order for Tuesday, July 13, 2021. There was no real ‘mystery’ in the issue as alleged by Saket Gokhale, however, it only showed that he was ignorant about the remuneration of people employed at the United Nations and was trying to target a Union Minister in Modi government’s cabinet by alleging monetary irregularities. Thus, serial troller and fake news spreader Gokhale failed miserably in his attempt to ruin the Puris’ reputation through false and baseless accusations. He chose the wrong target, however, by going against Mrs Lakshmi Puri, and now he is all set to pay a heavy price.