Management Guru Arindam Chaudhuri files Rs 50 crore law suit against magazine The Caravan Penguin and Google in Assam

Arindam Chaudhuri, Director of the Indian Institute of Planning and Management (IIPM) has filed a lawsuit against The Caravan magazine, citing ‘grave harassment and injury’ to the brand IIPM and seeking damages worth Rs. 50 crore..Arindam Chaudhuri, Director of the Indian Institute of Planning and Management (IIPM) has filed a lawsuit against The Caravan magazine, citing ‘grave harassment and injury’ to the brand IIPM and seeking damages worth Rs. 50 crore..The action has been taken against a cover story published by the magazine in February 2011 issue, titled ‘Sweet Smell of Success: How Arindam Chaudhuri Made a Fortune Off the Aspirations—and Insecurities—of India’s Middle Classes’, which has been excerpted from Siddhartha Deb’s upcoming book published by Penguin..The story talked about how Chaudhuri has built an image for himself, and how he runs his educational institution, IIPM..Besides The Caravan and its proprietors, the suit also charges the author, Siddhartha Deb; Penguin, the publisher of the upcoming book by Deb in which the article is a chapter and Google India for ‘publishing, distributing, giving coverage, circulating, blogging the defamatory, libellous and slanderous articles’..The lawsuit has not been filed in Delhi where both the IIPM and the magazine’s publisher, Delhi Press are based. Instead the suit has been filed in the Court of Civil Judge in Silchar district, Assam by Kishorendu Gupta, who operates Gupta Electrical Engineers in Silchar. IIPM is the second plaintiff named in the suit..The petition claims that The Caravan has published a false, incorrect, defamatory and libellous article and has made false imputations against the IIPM, which the author and editors of The Caravan knew to be false, and that these were made with the intention to defame the IIPM institute..The Court has granted an ex-parte injunction in favour of IIPM and The Caravan has been forced to remove the story from their website..However, The Caravan in its detailed press release says “they intend to fight this suit because we believe that we must defend the right of journalists to report on controversial subjects or persons without undue fear of legal intimidation from powerful entities or organisations that seek to insulate themselves from criticism”..The publication also claims that Deb’s article was based on “exhaustive reporting included interviews with Arindam Chaudhuri himself and several of his close associates who spoke openly about the IIPM and its critics, coverage of Chaudhuri’s public functions, and an account of considerable time spent on the IIPM campus”..Speaking to Bar & Bench on the lawsuit Director Anant Nath, Delhi Press group said, “The fact is that this has become a pattern with IIPM that whenever anyone writes against them, they would file a case against that specific publication or a group or a blogger with a view of harassing them. The reason that he files these cases in remote locations, where neither IIPM is based nor the publication who has written about IIPM or Arindam Chaudhuri is based, is to simply cause harassment to the publisher”..Nath further said, “In our case there is an article in which our writer had in fact met Arindam couple of times and he met his associates while doing the research. We have followed all journalistic norms. They were well aware about the fact that the writer was working on a write up on them. Instead they decided to file a suit. We will not bow down to this. We will stand up and fight for the cause that we all believe in which is freedom of speech, freedom of expression and freedom of press. We will follow the due legal recourse and see how it shapes up”..This is not the first time that IIPM has filed a lawsuit against a publishing house. In the past, it has filed similar lawsuits against Rashmi Bansal, blogger and the editor of Just Another Magazine (JAM), in 2005, and Careers360 magazine in 2009..The detailed press release issued by The Caravan is available here.