When Gadkari's legal team thought a Faking News story was real

It seems that Nitin Gadkari’s legal team is obsessed with the idea of defamation. Their ears perk up very time someone utters “Gadkari”, but now they have taken their vigilance to a new level.Now they are also searching for news items related to adversaries of Gadkari, and telling the court about their “bad behaviour”.On Tuesday, arguing against Prashant Bhushan who is representing AAP president Arvind Kejriwal in the defamation case, Gadkari’s lawyers told the court that Prashant Bhushan was planning to teach law to all the judges of this country by offering free home tuitions. An act of hubris, they claimed, constituted contempt of court. As evidence, they presented "news reports" of the same.[caption id="attachment_1292423" align="alignleft" width="380"]

Nitin Gadkari in this file photo. PTI[/caption]But before this passionate appeal could be made to declare Prashant Bhushan guilty, it became apparent that Gadkari’s lawyers were guilty “contempt of common sense”.The “news item” that they referred to was from “Faking News” – Firstpost’s news satire offering. One can read the report here.For the benefit of people like Gadkari’s lawyers, we would like to make it clear that “news satire” is a work of fiction and no Gadkaris or Bhushans are injured during making of such news reports.There have been earlier occasions when reports by Faking News were reported as true news by some mainstream media outlets, but this is the first time they have made it to a court hearing as a piece of legal evidence, thanks to Gadkari’s team.However, doing justice to their own understanding, Gadkari’s counsels soon withdrew the “evidence” and called it an “inadvertent mistake” once they realized that it was a fake news report.Phew! Thanks Gadkari ji that your lawyers didn’t insist on pressing charges against Prashant Bhushan, else another Faking News report could have come true: “The basic unit of defamation is gadkari”And yeah, to Mr Gadkari’s lawyers, a clarification: Nitin Gadkari and Bappi Lahiri are indeed two different persons.