904-NMS-1220-15-F4.DOC significance only for this limited purpose: Ms. Dalal’s query to Mr. Ravi Narayan and Ms. Chitra Ramakrishan was no idle accusation. She had then not gone to press with her article. She took the trouble firstly to make her own investigations, and then specifically to solicit the views of the two persons who manage and run the NSE. I do not believe she was duty-bound to do more. She had with her a damning letter, albeit anonymous, but one that contained a welter of detail that could not be denied and that, on my reading of it, certainly calls for a response, irrespective of the source. To decry this as the handiwork of a disgruntled individual or to belittle the anonymous author is, I think, in this day and age of the statutory recognition of what are called ‘whistleblowers’, to attempt to deny the undeniable. To say that there must be material from which a person may draw a conclusion is only half the story. Very often, as in such cases, while silence might not quite be ‘consent’ as Mr. Malcolm for the 1st Defendant would have it, it might certainly be enough to lead one to a conclusion that the addressees of this letter had nothing in fact to say in response at all. The only alternative to that view is again a point that Ms. Dalal makes in her articles, viz., that the persons in charge at the NSE felt it beneath them to deign to respond to what is indubitably a very serious case made manifestly in the public interest. The question of paragraph 18A of the plaint not having received a reply on affidavit, is, I think, somewhat misplaced. That is not the issue. The question is why was this so-called answer not provided at a time when the NSE had a opportunity to provide it? Had that been done, and had that answer not been further investigated or controverted and had the present offending article then been published as if there was no such answer, the NSE might then have had a case to make. I do not 17 of 30 ::: Uploaded on - 10/09/2015 ::: Downloaded on - 03/02/2020 18:08:37 :::