On Thursday, the Delhi High Court ordered that a portion of Trinamool Congress Rajya Sabha MP Saket Gokhale's monthly salary be withheld until he deposits Rs 50 lakh with the court. This amount is the damages he was ordered to pay to former diplomat Lakshmi Puri in a defamation case. On July 1, 2024, the high court ordered Gokhale to apologise to Puri for his social media posts about Puri's financial matters and an apartment in Geneva, and to pay Rs 50 lakh as compensation. Gokhale was instructed to post the apology on his X handle, which should remain for “six months from the date it is put out,” and print it in a leading English newspaper within four weeks.

In a different petition, Gokhale has requested that the July 2024 order be overturned. On Thursday, Gokhale's lawyer told Justice Manmeet Pritam Singh Arora that Gokhale is unwilling to issue an apology, as doing so would make his request to revoke the July 2024 order pointless. However, Justice Arora noted that there is “no reasonable explanation” for Gokhale’s “not depositing the decretal amount.”

The court has ordered that a warrant be issued to attach a portion of Gokhale's salary, which he has declared as Rs 1.90 lakh per month, based on the Code of Civil Procedure rules for securing the wages of government employees. The court further instructed that the salary will stay attached until Gokhale guarantees Rs 50 lakh to the court. In July 2021, the high court issued a temporary order, prohibiting Gokhale from posting defamatory, misleading, or false tweets about Puri or her husband, Hardeep Singh Puri, a former diplomat and the union minister for petroleum and natural gas.

In her lawsuit, Puri accused Gokhale of "tarnishing her good name and reputation by making reckless and false allegations" regarding her financial matters, specifically in the “context of an apartment that she owns in Geneva, Switzerland”, which Gokhale had mentioned in detailed tweets.