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2. The plaintiff has been impelled to file this suit by reason of certain „tweets‟ put-out by defendant No.1 in the public domain, which the plaintiff claims have defamed her and her family. The tweets that the plaintiff finds offensive are set-out subsequently in the judgment.

3. The plaintiff contends that the tweets contain malicious falsehood, as a result of which her reputation has been tarnished. She seeks a direction to defendant No.1 to take-down and delete the offending tweets from the public domain; an order restraining him from publishing any further tweets in the same vein; an unconditional apology from defendant No.1; as well as a decree of damages in the sum of Rs. 5 crores, with a further direction that the money be deposited in the Prime Minister‟s Citizen Assistance and Relief in Emergency Situations Fund („PM CARES Fund‟). The plaintiff also seeks costs of the present proceedings.

26. The plaintiff laments that 03 decades of hard-work and dedicated public service put-in by her has been tarnished by the untruthful and false statements made by defendant No.1 in the offending tweets.

27. Most importantly, the plaintiff contends, that defendant No.1 did not exercise the required due-diligence and caution before publishing the offending tweets and proceeded to put-out falsehood in the public domain by referring only to the disclosure affidavits filed by the plaintiff‟s husband before the Election Commission of India in connection with his Rajya Sabha nomination papers. The argument accordingly is, that had defendant No.1 exercised due-diligence, he could have sought clarification from the plaintiff, who would have given full answers to the doubts entertained by defendant No.1 in relation to the purchase of the apartment. Instead, it is submitted, that as recorded by this court vide judgment dated 13.07.2021 disposing-of the interim application filed in the matter, defendant No.1 has taken the stand that no law requires him to exercise due-diligence before posting any content about anyone on social-media platforms.

31. It is also argued that the „misinformation‟ that defendant No.1 has put-out by way of the offending tweets is exempt from disclosure even under section 8 of the Right to Information Act 2005, if a query were to be made under that statute. It is accordingly, the contention that the plaintiff was constrained to disclose that she had received money from her daughter to purchase the apartment only because of the falsehood spread by defendant No.1; and had that not been the case, no law could have compelled the plaintiff to make that disclosure since receipt of money by the plaintiff from her daughter was a strictly private matter between blood relatives and close family members.

"33. That the contents of Para 21 are wrong and denied. It is wrong and denied that the Defendant has in his series of tweets dated 23.06.2021 made a false and scurrilous/malicious/libellous allegation/insinuation that the Plaintiff along with her husband have purchased a house in Geneva, Switzerland in the year 2006 with ―black money‖. It is denied that the Defendant has in one of his cf. para 24 of Written Statement filed by defendant No.1 tweets referred to swiss bank accounts and foreign black money and tagged the Union Finance Minister to order a money laundering enquiry by the Enforcement Directorate on the Plaintiff and her husband. It is wrong and denied that the Defendant has created an architecture of falsehood through distortion of facts, baseless assumptions and fabricated information to impute that how could the Plaintiff and her husband buy a house in Switzerland within their given income or that he has insinuated a mystery about it or implied that it may have been acquired from ill-gotten wealth. Defendant had only raised questions on the basis of publicly available information. The context of the tweets has deliberately been suppressed by the Plaintiff."