New Delhi: A local court has rejected controversial NGO operator Medha Patkar’s application to introduce and examine an additional witness in her ongoing defamation case against Delhi Lieutenant-Governor (LG) V. K. Saxena.

Judicial Magistrate First Class (JMFC) Raghav Sharma of Saket Court ruled that the plea appeared to be a strategic attempt to delay proceedings rather than a genuine necessity. The court stressed that allowing such requests without valid justification could set a precedent for indefinite trial extensions.

The court noted that neither Patkar nor her witnesses had previously mentioned this new witness during the 24-year-long trial. It reasoned that if the witness were truly crucial, they should have been identified earlier.

“The judicial process cannot be held hostage to such tactics, especially in a case pending for over two decades,” the court stated.

Patkar and Saxena have been engaged in a legal battle since 2000, after she filed a lawsuit against him for publishing advertisements targeting her and the Narmada Bachao Andolan. At the time, Saxena was leading the Ahmedabad-based NGO Council for Civil Liberties. In 2001, he initiated two cases against Patkar, accusing her of making defamatory remarks about him on a television channel and issuing a defamatory press statement.

In one of these cases, a Delhi court sentenced Patkar to five months of simple imprisonment on July 1 last year. DeshGujarat