New Delhi: The Gujarat high court’s decision to reserve its verdict on journalist Ravi Nair’s plea challenging his arrest will mean that the journalist who reported on the Adani Group will remain in jail at least till September 30.A non-bailable warrant had been issued against Nair by a sessions court over his non-appearance in a defamation case filed by Adani Enterprise. Nair has noted in his plea that the sessions court had done so without issuing any formal summons or notice.When Nair appeared before the court on September 17 and sought cancellation of the warrant, but was sent to judicial custody.Justice M.K. Thakker heard the arguments on September 23 and reserved the order till next Wednesday despite Nair’s counsel, advocate Abhik Chimni requesting interim relief.“As this matter been heard fully and matter is kept for dictation, no interim relief is required to be granted,” Justice Thakker said, according to LiveLaw.In the hearing, Chimni said that Nair has attended the trial regularly and that in a total of eight hearings, he had appeared four times and that in July, his application for exemption from personal appearance was allowed. He also submitted that it was not as if Nair was absconding and said that the trial court’s claim was erroneous.Human rights organisation Amnesty International has issued a statement expressing concerning over Nair’s arrest, saying it “poses serious questions around people’s freedom of expression and fair trial rights in the country”.The online news outlets’ collective Digipub has called it “deeply disturbing”.In a statement, Digipub has noted: “There is another reason this case should concern the media community. The same corporate entity pursuing criminal defamation proceedings against a journalist also ultimately controls a major news organisation whose journalists operate in the same profession and ecosystem.”A trial court in Gujarat’s Mansa had sentenced Nair to a year’s imprisonment and a fine of Rs 5,000 on February 10, in a case filed by the multinational Adani group. The court had also granted him a month’s stay on arrest.Adani Enterprise Limited (AEL) had filed the criminal defamation suit against Nair on September 3, 2021 and alleged that Nair had posted a series of tweets from his X account, from October 2020 till July 2021, involving the enterprise, which it said were ‘scandalous’ , ‘false’, ‘misleading’, ‘derogatory’ and ‘defamatory’ in nature.As AltNews has reported, Nair’s lawyers had “argued that the tweets were in good faith as they were based on research done from articles already available in the public domain. They argued that since the accused didn’t come up with the accusations on his own, and he merely shared those links, and as the authors of the mentioned articles haven’t been implicated in the trial, so Ravi Nair should also be acquitted from the charges.”India is ranked 157th out of 180 countries in the 2026 World Press Freedom Index published by Reporters Without Borders.