On the afternoon of August 17, 2026, officials from the Gujarat police conducted parallel searches at two homes of journalist Ravi Nair in Kerala and Delhi. They seized two of Ravi’s mobile phones from his residence in Kerala. At Ravi’s Delhi residence, law enforcement officials took his son’s laptop, as well as the laptop and iPad of a colleague who was present there.
Neither his son nor the colleague are accused in the case.
These seizures are in connection with a police case against Ravi for a tweet he posted on X. Ravi’s tweet was about a story he co-reported on the Adani Group, which was published by The Washington Post in October 2025. The story alleged that Indian officials had drafted and pushed through a proposal in May that year to steer about $3.9 billion in investments to Adani’s businesses from the state-owned Life Insurance Corporation of India (LIC). The investigation was based on internal documents from the LIC, the Indian Department of Financial Services, interviews with current and former officials at these agencies, as well as three Indian bankers familiar with Adani Group finances.
On April 22, an employee of the Adani Ports and Special Economic Zone Limited (APSEZ) in Ahmedabad filed a defamation complaint against Ravi’s tweet. Several months later, the same staffer filed a second complaint, based on which the Gujarat police officials then filed a First Information Report (FIR), invoking sections related to cheating and forgery of documents.
Meanwhile, Ravi approached the Gujarat High Court. Ravi’s plea was that “mere denial by the LIC of the reports published by the petitioner in the Washington Post, would not make the petitioner liable for the offence alleged against him in the FIR and also mere denial of the facts narrated in the Article by the LIC, would not make the documents, based upon which, the article was published by the petitioner in the Washington Post, forged, and therefore, the petitioner herein cannot be prosecuted for the offence in question.”
During the hearings for this case, lawyers representing the Adani Group employee as well as those representing the state of Gujarat cast aspersions on The Washington Post investigation. They claimed that the documents this report was based on could have been forged.
In an order dated August 11, the Gujarat High Court dismissed Ravi’s petition to quash the FIR against him. The court held that the defamation complaint and the FIR, which related to allegations of document forgery, were different. And so, it added, the investigating agency in this case needed to determine whether or not the documents that The Washington Post story relied on were authentic.
The raids at Ravi’s residences in Kerala and Delhi took place days after this ruling. The Gujarat police officials refused to provide the hash values of the seized devices in both Kerala and Delhi. A hash value is a numeric value that identifies data uniquely. This means that if the data on a device is tampered with after it is seized, the hash value of that device will change. The police’s refusal to share this value goes against the guidelines the Supreme Court provided in 2023, while it was hearing a petition filed by the Foundation of Media Professionals.
The raid took place hours after the Additional Chief Judicial Magistrate court in Ahmedabad authorised police officials to search Ravi’s houses on August 17. It did so in response to an application filed by the Investigating Officer in this case. The application argued that crucial incriminating evidence, essential documents, and electronic devices relevant to the case were stored at Ravi’s residences.
Gujarat police officials reached Ravi’s Kerala and Delhi residences at around the same time, about 2 pm. The search lasted about four hours at both homes. In Kerala, the cops seized Ravi’s old and unused phones along with his pendrives. In Delhi, officials seized Ravi’s son’s laptop, as well as the laptop and iPad of his colleague Sachi Hedge, who was at Ravi’s Delhi residence at the time.