By Rajan Narayan

IT is not widely known that it is not the management but the editor who is responsible for every letter and word which appears in the publication he is employed by. Not just the editorials written by the editor but every article, every news report and even published letters written to the editor. I learnt this to the hard way when in the early years of my employment as editor of the “OHeraldo” I published a letter by ardent letter writer N Menezes.
Prof Menezes was unhappy with the decisions of the Saligao panchayat and wrote a letter to me as editor, complaining about the working of the Saligao panchayat. Unfortunately, one of my junior staffers gave the letter the heading, “Justice Goan-style.” The then preceding judge of the Goa Bench of the Bombay High Court took offence. Dr Gustavo Filipe Couto decided that we had passed a derogatory comment on the judiciary in Goa.
The letter-writer’s comments in her letter were not about the judiciary but on the working of the Saligao panchayat. However, Justice Gustavo Couto took suo moto cognizance of the small little letter titled “Justice Goan-style in the letters column of the “OHeraldo.” A case was filed and I was represented in the high court by the then senior advocate Ferdino Inacio Rebello, who later became the chief justice of the Allahabad High Court.
The late Justice Gustavo Couto was adamant that our letter writer’s letter as worded in the heading was defaming the judiciary in Goa. My lawyer tried to clarify that the letter’s heading was not a comment on Goa’s judiciary. But for reasons best known to him Justice Couto had made up his mind. However, he ruled that Prof N Menezes could be forgiven because she was a layperson not familiar with the law. But as the editor of the “OHeraldo” I could not be forgiven and Justice Gustavo Couto dubbed me a habitual contemptor. This judgment must be there as part of the records of the Goa Bench of the Bombay high court.
MY second brush with the judiciary was during the hearing of the Churchill Alemao smuggling case before the Goa Bench of the Bombay high court. The Central Bureau of Investigation had filed a case against customs officer Costao Fernandes on charges of murdering Alvernaz Alemao. The death of Alvernaz Alemao was due to a scuffle between customs officer Costao Fernandes and Alvernaz Alemao in a Contessa car belonging to Churchill Alemao. Alvernaz Alemao was allegedly smuggling gold in empty battery containers in the dicky of the car.
Senior customs officer Daya Shankar had filed a case of gold smuggling against Churchill Alemao and his brother. Churchill used his political influence to get the CBI to file a case of murder against Costao. The hearing of the case was scheduled at the afternoon session at the Goa Bench of the Bombay high court in Panaji. At that time there were flights from Bombay to Goa only in the afternoon. This is because the navy monopolized Dabolim airport in the morning and permitted private flights only after 2pm.
Now Churchill Alemao’s lawyer was the most noted lawyer Ram Jethmalani and he came a day earlier to Goa. Ram Jethmalani was a very powerful lawyer and he bullied the presiding Judge Gurudas Datta Kamat to take up the hearing of the case first, though it was listed very low down on the court board and would have normally come up for hearing only in the afternoon. The case was taken up without waiting for the senior advocate of customs, Ajit Shirodkar, whose flight from Bombay was in the afternoon.
Junior advocate Ranjana Desai could not match Ram Jethmalani. So much so that before the customs lawyer could arrive, Justice Gurudas Datta Kamat had permitted the filing of the severe charge sheet against Costao Fernandes. I was present at the court along with additional collector customs, the legendary Daya Shankar, who had become a good friend of mine.
The next day in my editorial in the “OHeraldo” I dared to criticize Justice Gurudas Datta Kamat for unfairly rushing through the case for Ram Jethmalani. I lamented that Justice Kamat had come under pressure from Churchill Alemao and had not waited for customs lawyer Ajit Shirodkar to arrive in the afternoon. The then High Court Bar Association president, the late MS Usgaonkar, filed a contempt petition against me as the editor of the “OHeraldo.” Usgaonkar alleged that I had defamed the judiciary and Justice Gurudas Datta Kamat.
The irony of the law of contempt is that the truth is not a defense in a contempt case. The logic is that anything which brought the judiciary into discredit is contempt of court. The Goa High Court Bar Association had the case shifted to the Bombay HC and hired a top senior Bombay lawyer, Sarosh Zaiwalla.
However, at that time I was very sick due to the terrible side effects of the large doses of steroids I was taking post the severe beating up I had got from being beaten up with iron rods courtesy Goa Assembly speaker Dayanand Narvekar (in a “supari” case) in 1986. My weight had soared to 180 kg plus and I could barely breathe while walking. Those years were terrible for me. The case came up for final hearing almost a year before a bench of senior judge Madhav Laxman Pendse and Michael Francis Saldanha who was an auxiliary judge just being appointed to the HC. Justice ML Pendse dismissed the arguments made by my lawyer Colin Gonsalves, now a senior human rights advocate of the Supreme Court. Justice ML Pendse ruled that I was guilty of contempt and dismissed my defense that I only reported the truth. Justice Pendse thundered that truth was no defense in the contempt case. Fortunately, I was not sent to jail but was asked to publish a half-page apology in the “OHeraldo.”
CRIMINAL defamation cases are a much greater source of harassment. Unlike in the case of a civil defamation case where the petitioner only seeks damages, you can be sent to jail in a criminal defamation case. I faced my most exhausting criminal defamation case which was linked to the Churchill Alemao smuggling case. I was informed by the customs that a Goa-based hotel owner Narain Dossa had helped Churchill Alemao in hiding the smuggled gold. Narain Dossa, who had a bungalow in Lonavala besides his hotel in Goa, filed a case against the editor/publisher and the directors of the OHeraldo in a small district court in Vadgaon, close to Lonavala.
Summons were issued not only to me but to the then publisher AC Fernandes and his sons John Fernandes and Raul Fernandes. The first time we travelled together in a car to Vadgaon, which is very close to Pune. Then we discovered that none of the local lawyers in the rural court would represent us because they were all controlled by Narain Dossa. The judge also refused to give us an exemption from personal appearance in the court. This meant that we had to travel over 600 kms from Goa to Bombay and then from Bombay to Vadgaon almost every month to attend the court. We finally managed to find a very good Goan young woman, Charmine Buccaro to accompany us to Vadgaon to represent us. She got an exemption for my publisher and the other directors.
But I had to go almost every month with my lawyer Charmine even though my health was in a precarious state. The case dragged on for almost four years. Then one day I happened to be on the same flight as Churchill Alemao when I was going to Mumbai to proceed to Vadgaon for the case. Churchill Alemao told me on the flight that he would get Narain Dossa to withdraw the case if I supported him in the forthcoming assembly elections. I agreed and from the airport, we went straight to the 5-star The Leela Hotel near Bombay airport. There, Zavier Marques, a close associate of Dawood Ibrahim who looked after the film interests of the don, was present. Zavier had summoned Narain Dossa and directed him to withdraw the case. Dossa tried to protest but could not withstand pressure from Zavier. The criminal defamation case was finally withdrawn but not before we were forced to submit a big apology to the OHeraldo newspaper.
HOWEVER, my sweetest victory in a defamation case was perhaps the verdict in the civil and criminal case filed against me and the Goan Observer by the Sanatan Sanstha. One of my reporters, Gauree Malkarnekar, who is now a senior assistant editor in The Times Of India, managed to get hold of a manual on armed training imparted to the workers of the Sanatan Sanstha. The manual had images of bearded Muslims being attacked by trishul by a saffron Hindu fanatic. The manual also had images of training in firearms imparted to the followers and residents of the Sanatan Asharam on the premises of the Shanta Durga temple in Ponda.
The Sanatan Sanstha filed both a civil and a criminal defamation case against me and the Goan Observer. It took four years for the cases to be decided and during time I had to make dozens of trips to the magistrate court in Ponda. Fortunately, we had the satisfaction of both the civil and criminal cases being dismissed.
To conclude I would like to mention how a California-based artist of Goan origin managed to get the editor-in-chief of The Times of India to repeatedly come to Goa to face a defamation charges in a case. The art critic of the TOI was Dyaneshwar Nadkarni and had written a review on an exhibition of paintings by artist Dom Martin. Unfortunately, Dyaneshwar had not only trashed the paintings but called Dom Martin a palpable hoax.
The artist Dom Martin promptly filed a criminal and civil defamation suit charging that an art critic was free to comment on his paintings, but not on his character. Though Girilal Jain had nothing to do with the TOI critic and his review of the artist’s artwork, he just happened to be the editor-in-chief of the TOI. Girilal Jain was a very revered figure who used to insist that his editorials were meant for Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.
However, even after his retirement, Girilal Jain was forced to repeatedly travel to Goa to attend the hearings of the particular case. Defamation cases are filed in a personal capacity against editors and not just an organization. So much so that even if an editor is a retired editor he has to appear in court till the final judgement is delivered. After almost a decade the case filed by Dom Martin against the TOI and Girilal Jain was dismissed on technical grounds by the Supreme Court.
Such is the life and times of media persons in my over 50 years of experience in journalism in Bombay, now Mumbai, and later Goa.