Mahendra Singh Dhoni, captain of the Indian national cricket team, has sued Zee TV for Rs. 100 crores, or one billion rupees due to defamation. He is also captain of the Chennai Super Kings team in the IPL tournament. A secret report given to the Supreme Court contains testimony from a Tamil Nadu cop that names Dhoni.

His case was filed in the Madras High Court demanding for this money as damages from the channel. Dhoni’s case is that Zee TV had been showing false reports that suggested his involvement in betting and match fixing. The court barred Zee TV from broadcasting any reports on the 32 year-old cricketer for the next few weeks. In his complaint to the court, the cricketer said “he was aggrieved by [the] highly defamatory, scandalous, libellous and malicious false reports and statements” being made by the channel and former police officer G Sampath Kumar.

Zee argued that it had never targeted any one specifically, and nor had it shown any program that did so, but it had only been trying to inform its views about the corruption in a large industry. 

This is not the first time that this has happened. Just last year, the IPL franchise was caught in controversy when its formal Team Principal Gurunath Meiyappan, son-in-law of the country’s cricket board chief N Srinivasan, was arrested for his alleged involvement in betting in IPL matches, which was later proven. Mr. Srinivasan was also forced to “step aside” once the charges against his son-in-law became public, but he was reinstated as cricket board chief in October. After finding evidence that proved Meiyappan to be illegally betting, some Indian media has speculated that the report also mentions Dhoni’s name.

[Image Attribute: “Swann stumped by Dhoni” by Nazly Ahmed]