Bringing a biographer to book

ACCORDING to recent newspaper reports, Maneka Gandhi has decided to sue Indira Gandhi's biographer, Kathleen Frank, in a British court for defaming her late husband Sanjay Gandhi, and thereby bringing disrepute to herself and her family. In British law it is nearly impossible to win a suit which claims damages on behalf of a dead man: British law reasons that only the living can, strictly speaking, be defamed. However, it does allow that calumnies against the dead which can be shown to have consequentially slandered the living are legitimate grievances, and, therefore, admissable in a law suit. We must presume from this that Maneka Gandhi has been advised to sue for the indirect damage done to her reputation by a Frank opinion - namely that she was married not just to a man who created unconstitutional mayhem within a whole country (This is backed up by P. N. Dhar's recent memoirs) - but also, if Frank is to be believed, someone who ordered the elimination of specific and named individuals.

One of the strangenesses of the law - as we have seen in relation to Jayalalitha and Laloo Yadav as well - is that a politician can emasculate and impoverish an entire region and get away with it until he loses the next election, or until, by some lucky chance, the nation finds itself rid of him in a flying accident. Ever since the high-flying Sanjay Gandhi took to aerobatics, I have often hoped that public minded Indians will some day be persuaded to pool in and donate a single-cockpit aeroplane to every shady politician. But the unfortunate fact is that, short of providing the people who rule us, such extravagant incentives to depart in the direction of heavenly abodes, the only way a politician can even vaguely be nailed is via an individual and specific charge of corruption or murder. And even then, being nailed in our context bears no resemblance to the crucifixion: it has come to mean occasional harassment in dilatory courts and paying bribes to policemen.

The punishment context of politicians also holds good, by analogy, for the writer of a book or a magazine article. Writers can voice huge defamatory generalities against a nation and get away with it, but not against specific individuals. Katherine Mayo and V.S. Naipaul's opinions of Indian civilisation could not have made them financially poorer in any courtroom, and Katherine Frank is free to voice the general opinion of most Indians which goes: "All Indian politicians are corrupt and several are probably murderers too". But she can, on the other hand, be dragged into the dock by Maneka Gandhi for having voiced (what Frank might plausibly say was) the equally general opinion of most Indians which goes: "Sanjay Gandhi was a corrupt politician and had some people bumped off".

Nevertheless, Maneka Gandhi's reasons for seeking justice remain rather odd, for two reasons. First, her chances of winning this infamy suit do not seem very high even if the court accepts her argument of indirect damage to her family's repute. British courts have generally shown themselves in favour of freedom of speech and do not easily award damages if finding in favour of the plaintiff also means censoring scholarly opinions reasonably backed up by research. This was manifest in a suit involving Khushwant Singh some five years ago. Khushwant Singh and his publishers were sued for defamation in a British court by the Canada-based Khalistani Jagjit Singh Chauhan. Chauhan's complaint was that in the revised second volume of Khushwant Singh's History of the Sikhs, the author had asserted, without evidence, that when resident in Canada, Chauhan was a shorn tobacco-smoking citizen; he grew his hair and stopped smoking only to establish his credibility as a revolutionary Khalistani when in India. Chauhan argued that this assertion was, centrally, untrue; and additionally that Khushwant Singh could not be allowed to air such a defamatory opinion in the public domain only on the grounds of it being a "generally known fact" about Chauhan.

If Maneka Gandhi's intention, like Chauhan's, is to try, American-style, to win huge damages for libel, she will not get very far because Chauhan got nowhere at all. In the Khushwant versus Chauhan case the judge gave a typically aristocratic British judgment: he awarded Chauhan the sum of One Penny as symbolic damages on the grounds that, in line with the high standards he had set in the rest of his book, Khushwant Singh ought to have been more careful in collecting, citing and footnoting the evidence for Chauhan's low credentials as a Khalistani. Simultaneously, Khushwant Singh's publishers, who had fought the case on the author's behalf, were awarded full costs of the case, which meant that Chauhan was asked to shell out a huge sum of money to the publishers and their lawyers. When last heard of, Chauhan was still being pursued for this sum somewhere in the northern Canadian tundra.

The second reason for Maneka Gandhi's suit being an odd pursuit is based not on legal precedent but plain common sense. Surely the charge of defamation can only be sustained by presupposing that the plaintiff's late husband had any sort of reputation left which could still be defamed.

If Maneka Gandhi does indeed presuppose this, it would suggest either plain silliness, or else something even more implausible - that she epitomises the suffering Hindu widow who continues to be in love with her husband and will go to even sillier lengths to defend his reputation. It would, at any rate, seem judicious for the British courts to ask Maneka Gandhi this question before they dismiss her plea - it is certainly a question that readers of the biography want to ask: What kind of reputation is she trying to defend anyway?

The fact of the matter is that the Frank biography, which seems reasonably solidly based on archives even if not on interviews - at least two people, B. K. Nehru and Mrs. Rupika Chawla, have cast doubt on the accuracy of its interviews - merely confirms what most Indians who lived through the Emergency have long believed, namely that Sanjay Gandhi was a mollycoddled heir apparent who, rather like the children of several contemporary politicians, blossomed into an enterprising political businessman under the shadow of a blindly doting parent. To such Indians, who were overjoyed by the electoral come-uppance given to Mother and Son after the Emergency, it has come as no surprise to read in the Frank biography what the law has compelled us merely to suspect without being able to voice - that Sanjay Gandhi was only an English-medium version of the Hindi-Hindu political hoods who hold sway in the cow belt.

It cannot be doubted that Maneka Gandhi's heart bled for her husband on the day he died. In this she was joined perhaps only by the dead man's mother and their friends and cronies: the country merely breathed a silent sigh of relief. It is now high time Maneka Gandhi stopped her bleeding heart, it does not wash. It may even nurture in the Indian reading public a strong suspicion that she wants not so much to kill a book as make a killing in the market. As it is, she has deprived us of the pleasure of reading Khushwant Singh's autobiography by stopping its publication in an Indian court. To root for Katherine Frank and her publishers in this context would be to give three cheers for the unhindered publication of enjoyable biography and intellectual freedom.

Ever since Sanjay and Indira Gandhi died, we have become used to these cultural virtues and do not want them dampened by yet another misguided Gandhi. Good sense would suggest that it is best to let sleeping dogs lie. Maneka can only lose repute by stoking up her connection with Sanjay Gandhi, whereas she might actually gain some if she has the intelligence to drop these unconvincing book cases and goes back to loving the animal kingdom.

Rukun Advani is the author of Beethoven Among the Cows and runs Permanent Black, a publishing company in New Delhi.

RUKUN ADVANI

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