On Tuesday, Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said that he has sued senior Congress leaders to pay ₹500 crore as damages in his case against them under defamation on the grounds that they were making false, malice, and defamatory remarks against him.
Sarma posted on X that he had filed a case against Congress Leaders Jitendra Singh, Bhupesh Baghel, and Gaurav Gogoi due to allegations brought against him in a recent press meeting. He said that today he had filed a defamation suit against Congress leaders Jitendra Singh, Bhupesh Baghel, and Gaurav Gogoi to pay damages amounting to 500 crore against false, malicious, and defamatory statements made against him.
The lawsuit is after Assam Congress had launched a website known as Who Is HBS on February 4, as well as a pamphlet claiming the chief minister to be corrupt, an abuser of power, and disrespectful of cultural icons. The site, which was calling on people to provide information about the supposed assets of Sarma, briefly went offline shortly after its introduction.
Gaurav Gogoi justified the move by arguing that it was a broader campaign to reveal those lies and abuse of power by Sarma. He claimed that Sarma and his family had almost 12,000 bighas of land, or approximately 4,000 acres of land, and accused that the rules were being manipulated to turn agricultural lands into industrial land. Gogoi pledged that the Congress would look into these acquisitions once it was voted into power and would redistribute land among the poor in case of irregularities.
The same assertions were made by Bhupesh Baghel and Jitendra Singh, who made allegations that Sarma and his family received a vast land and several firms, with the alleged anomalies being reported to have occurred even prior to Sarma joining the BJP in 2015.
Denying the allegations, Sarma claimed they were personal and politically motivated. He had also said earlier this month that he would pursue civil and criminal defamation because he claimed that the allegations were now to be established in court and not pursued as a political motive.
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