The Flip Side of Defamation

 Stating that it didn’t have jurisdiction, the Delhi High Court, on January 29, dismissed the defamation case that former narcotics officer Sameer Wankhede had filed against the makers of Ba***ds of Bollywood for defam­ing him. In 2021, the show's director, Aryan Khan, son of Shah Rukh Khan, had been arrested by Wankhede in an alleged drug bust on a cruise ship’s rave party. When Khan came out with his hit Netflix comedy show last year, he took a swipe back by portraying a character that resembled Wankhede. You would think a law enforcement officer should be protected against such mockery, but that is only taking half the context into contention.

Khan was later let off by the Narcotics Control Bureau which cited no evidence against him. He is now innocent as far as the law is concerned. Rewind, however, back to the day of the arrest and the headlines in every tele­vision channel and news­paper, with Wankhede himself the centrepiece. Even a selfie taken by an ‘independent witness’ with Khan while he was in detention went viral. There were no qualms about publicity so long as it was good publicity.

This is a common perk that Indian policing authorities consider the rewards of the job, even if the accused himself feels in every such case that his or her name is being defamed. As soon as an arrest is made, the news is leaked to the media. If it is a high-profile individual, then all the better because the spotlight is now bigger. From then on, all the way to the judicial process, leaks keep appear­ing through journalists who report them unquestioningly.

Wankhede made a reputation with such cases. His career has been on something of a downturn since then. He has been repatriated back to the Indian Revenue Service he was originally from. It is not just that he took on a case that was too big to handle, but its minor nature and the outsized spectacle created from it. It was not just Khan’s name but also that of his celebrity friends, who weren’t even on the cruise, that were dragged through the media. All of them would have rightly felt defamed too.