As SA was dealing with the aftermath of the unrest that swept through KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng last month, the controversial Gupta family lost a legal battle to force an Indian media house to remove online articles and broadcasts linking the brothers to the violent uprising.
Last week the Delhi high court declined to issue an interim order against Zee Media and Diligent Media Corporation (DNA) to remove the content, in response to a suit filed by Ajay Gupta.
Gupta filed the urgent suit for a “defamation and permanent injunction” after an episode hosted on July 14 by Zee News titled “What is the connection of South Africa riots to India Gupta Family”, and an article published on July 16 by DNA India titled “DNA Explainer: What led to unrest in South Africa and role of Gupta brothers”.
The articles claimed that the reasons behind “the attack on Indians in South Africa are the Gupta brothers, who migrated to South Africa in the 1990s from Uttar Pradesh Saharanpur”.
It further incorrectly claimed that Indians were the central focus of the attack and that more than 50,000 Indian-owned businesses were targeted.
It then detailed the Gupta family’s history in SA and its role in state capture, which was discussed at the Zondo commission this week.
The Gupta lawyers argued that the five articles had defamed their clients, but the media house responded that information on the Gupta brothers was widely available in the public domain and that the publications were not defamatory.
Despite the media house completely missing the mark on the actual cause of the unrest and publishing inaccurate information on the looting and protests, the court ruled against the Guptas, in effect declaring that the articles were not defamatory.
The media house, its legal team and the Guptas’ attorneys did not respond to requests for comment.
Media Monitoring Africa director William Bird said there was a need to acknowledge that even “scoundrels” deserved protection under the law.
“That said, the story is inaccurate and overly simplistic. I worry that it perpetuates a notion of black Africans as being unthinking savages who, seeing the Guptas’ success and allegations of theft, decided to just loot and attack South African Indians.
“It ignores racism and inequality and also the organised nature of the violence and looting.
“It also ignores that in many instances there were vigilante acts where black people were attacked and killed. To that extent then the article is really poor journalism and hopelessly inadequate as an explanation of the violence and looting.”
Bird said most of the content about the Guptas in the article is factual.
“In saying how many brothers there are, noting how they came to South Africa and started a business … those are all fair and true and none of those undermine the dignity and reputation of the Guptas. The article also refers to ‘allegations against the Gupta brothers of looting the government treasury’. There are indeed more than allegations and we know of at least one criminal case in relation to the Free State dairy scandal.”
One of the headlines above an image, which refers to “anger at the Gupta brothers for corruption”, was hardly unfair, Bird said.
“The most problematic aspect is that the story says: ‘The reason behind the attack on Indians in South Africa are the Gupta brothers.’ A similar assertion is made later on. I’m not clear as to why the court ruled the way it did, as while there may be much to lay at the door of the Guptas, I think even if their role played some part in some of the antagonism it seems inaccurate to say it was all because of them. Overall, it is a poor story, simplistic, inaccurate and unfair, and the story should be challenged on those grounds,” Bird said.
International relations & co-operation department spokesperson Clayson Monyela said the Indian government had not raised allegations of attacks on Indians in SA.
“They wouldn’t have contacted us over a false article like this because when the unrest happened, we convened a briefing with members of the diplomatic corps in Pretoria, so this would be foreign ambassadors accredited to South Africa and would have included the Indian high commissioner.
“We gave them facts as to what was happening on the ground, what government is doing in response to the unrest, and we updated them daily on the number of lives lost, the number of arrests and all the measures we were taking. They had information that was accurate and reliable, which they used as a basis to compile reports to send back home,” Monyela said.
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