Photo Source: The Wire By Naveed Qazi | Editor, Globe Upfront To censure activism and opponents, Indian corporates, for a while, have been using legal protection against journalists and campaigners. Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation (SLAPP) has become an instrument where the powerful dictate terms to the lesser privileged for their freedom of speech. Most commonly, they arise as defamation suits. Almost three years back, the RIL lawyers filed a complaint about a token damage of up to ‘₹100 Crore’ in ten days against the authors of ‘Gas Wars: Crony Capitalism And The Ambanis (2014)’. The antagonists in this book, the Ambanis, had called the charges laid down against them as ‘derogatory’. The kind of narrative, published in ‘Gas Wars’ (2014), had been quite different from what common masses heard about Reliance Industries. The adversarial views on RIL led to company’s ‘Streisand Effect’. In public, RIL, had been an entity, which had seemingly changed the corp...