In its 6.30 pm news bulletin on September 10, 2008, Times Now ran a story on a provident fund controversy involving some high court judges. While mentioning the
name of a judge of the Calcutta high court, P K Samantha, it inadvertently displayed the picture of a retired Supreme Court judge and former chairman of the Press Council of India, P B Sawant, for 15 seconds. The picture was not shown in the subsequent news bulletins, the channel apologised to Justice Sawant,and ran an apology for five continuous days on the channel.
In November 2008 Justice Sawant sued Times Now for defamation and a district court in Pune awarded him Rs 100 crore in damages. This level of damages is so out of line with what Indian courts normally award that one would have expected the higher judiciary to correct the aberration immediately. Instead, Times Now found to its shock when it appealed to the Bombay high court that it was required to deposit Rs 20 crore and provide a bank guarantee for the rest (Rs 80 crore) before its appeal would be heard.
India has never been a jurisdiction with high libel damages, and indeed even in cases of death and disability, the damages typically have been a fraction of the Times Now award. Thus the half a million victims of the Bhopal gas tragedy – those who died and those who suffered different levels of disability – received on
an average Rs 1,10,000 in damages. Again, as recently as in October 2011, the Supreme Court awarded Rs 10 lakh in damages to the families of those who died in a fire at a cinema in Delhi.
In the Times Now case, the inadvertent error hardly qualified as defamation,and in any case in the absence of malice punitive or exemplary damages were wholly uncalled for. The award of such damages is bound to have a chilling effect on the Indian media as a whole. Even more significantly, it would encourage copycat plaintiffs and trial judges to move on to wholly new and higher levels of damages claims and awards in libel cases. The judiciary in India has been protecting the media against encroachments on their freedom by the executive and the
legislature. It is ironic that the case with such a chilling effect should have been initiated by a former Supreme Court judge who has been the chairman of the Press Council of India. It is surprising that the higher judiciary too let so patent an aberration continue without relief even during the pendency of the appeal.
