The Supreme Court today (August 11) dismissed journalist Ravi Nair's petition challenging the Delhi High Court's order quashing his criminal defamation case filed against journalist Nilanjana Bhowmick over an article published in 2010 in Time magazine.

A bench of Justice JB Pardiwala and Justice Vinod Chandran dismissed the petition, refusing to interfere with the High Court's order.

It may be recalled that Ravi Nair, who runs the South Asia Human Rights Documentation Centre (SAHRDC), filed the complaint in November 2014. He was aggrieved by the journalist's article titled “Accountability of India's Nonprofits under Scrutiny,” which was published on December 14, 2020. The article discussed the alleged transgressions in the working of the NGOs and the “unscrupulousness” in India's sprawling non-profit sector.

It was Nair's case that the journalist allegedly defamed him, implying in the article that he and his organisation were involved in money laundering. Even though he sent an email to the Editor in 2010, the complaint was filed in 2014 after he came to know from his former colleague that the article continued to remain accessible online without restriction.

In October 2018, the trial court summoned Bhowmick in the criminal defamation case while proceedings were closed qua others. The journalist had filed the petition in 2021 challenging the complaint as well as the summoning order.

Justice Neena Bansal Krishna of the Delhi High Court quashed the complaint, observing that factually correct reporting cannot be termed as defamatory.

Granting relief to Bhowmick, Justice Krishna said that the reporting was factually correct and it did not state that Nair was indicted in the investigations initiated against his NGO. It added that every individual is entitled to vociferously cherish and protect his reputation, but it is not so fragile that “it would get sullied by such reporting.”

The Delhi High Court said that Nair was only trying to build a case of defamation by asserting that there were certain insinuations and innuendos in the Article, but that in itself cannot be held to be sufficient to make it a case of defamation.

Further, it was observed that the complaint to claim defamation qua the article that got first published in 2010 was patently barred by limitation, as the same was filed in 2014.

Case Details: RAVI NAIR Vs NILANJANA BHOWMICK|Diary No. 30029 / 2026