India's foreign minister has demanded a public apology from the Press Trust of India (PTI), after it described him as "absent minded" in parliament, the national news agency said on Friday. PTI had reported Thursday that S.M. Krishna "had to be prodded" by the speaker of the lower house to make a scheduled statement on the situation in Sri Lanka, and that he then failed to immediately find the speech in his file.
The news agency said that Krishna had served a legal notice alleging that the report was "completely false" and "malicious" and that a public apology is required. The notice also claimed that PTI had made efforts to deliberately damage the minister's reputation in recent months but did not mention any examples.
The agency called the notice "an extraordinary step," citing legislation that protects media from lawsuits regarding the coverage of parliament unless a report can be proved to have been made with malice. Krishna has previously come under fire for alleged public gaffes, notably in February this year, when he mistakenly read out a speech by his Portuguese counterpart at a United Nations meeting in New York. He read the first three minutes of the wrong text before one of his officials stepped in to point out his error.
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