14.
Mr. Arvind Nigam, ld. Senior Counsel appearing for Google Inc. and
YouTube LLC takes the following preliminary objections:
i) That the suit has been filed by a Power of Attorney – Mr. Gyandeep
Sharma. Since an action for defamation is an action in personam, the
Plaintiff ought to have personally verified and filed the plaint.
ii) That the suit lacks cause of action as there is nothing offensive
contained in the video.
iii) That the plaint does not refer to the judgment of the ld. Single
Judge in CM(M) 556/2018, which has only been placed before the
Court during the course of arguments, and only the closure report of
the CBI was relied on.
(iv) That the plaint relies upon four pages of URLs, however, there is
no mention as to which is the one which is extracted in the Plaint.
(v) That none of the persons who have uploaded the video have been
impleaded.
(vi) That there is no mention as to which is the offensive part in the
video. It is the settled position that the specific words which are
defamatory have to be pointed out, as held in the judgment of the
Supreme Court in R. Rajagopal v. State of Tamil Nadu 1994 SCC (6)
632. Since the entire plaint is mere paraphrasing and is only alleging
innuendo, the plaint ought to be rejected.
(vii) That the necessary party i.e. the uploader of the video having not
been impleaded, the suit would be liable to be dismissed. He relies
upon the judgments in ABC Laminart v AP Agencies, Salem (1989) 2
SCC 163 and Ramesh Hirachand Kundanmal v Municipal
Corporation of Greater Bombay and Others (1992) 2 SCC 524 to
CS (OS) 27/2019
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