Mohit Bharatiya, a former president of the BJYM Mumbai, on Tuesday, filed a criminal complaint against Maharashtra minister and NCP leader Nawab Malik in a court for allegedly defaming him by making "baseless allegations" in connection with the cruise ship drug haul case.
The complaint was filed in the court of Metropolitan Magistrate, Mazgaon, for offences under Indian Penal Code sections 499 (defamation) and 500 (punishment for defamation). Bhartiya stated that Malik had defamed him and his family by making baseless allegations against them.
According to the complaint, filed through advocate Ramiz Shaikh, Malik had addressed a press conference on October 9, "the narrative of which was to condemn the said raid by the NCB (Narcotics Control Bureau) at the Cordelia Cruise ship".
The NCB had arrested Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan's son Aryan Khan and others after raiding the cruise ship off the Mumbai coast on October 2. The agency had claimed that it recovered drugs.
The accused (Malik) was sore with the Narcotics Control Bureau as they had arrested his son-in-law in connection with another narcotics case in January 2021, it said.
During the said press conference, Malik purposefully and intentionally defamed the complainant and his brother-in-law Rishabh Sachdev to further the agenda that the NCB was acting under the influence of the Bharatiya Janata Party, as per the complaint.
The narrative of the press conference since the beginning was to draw a corollary between the BJP and the NCB and in that said attempt, the accused made serious associations and connections of the complainant to the infamous raid.
The complaint stated that Malik has misused his dominant position of being in power as a cabinet minister of the ruling party of the state government to target the NCB who were audacious enough to prosecute his son-in-law.
Bharatiya also claimed that the defamatory utterances by Malik have lowered and tarnished his image in the eyes of the general public and the reasonably-minded persons.
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