Misdirection to the jury

UNLESS the necessarily condensed report of Mr Justice McCardie’s summing up of the case to the jury has done him grievous injustice, it is perfectly clear that in his anxiety to sit in judgment upon the Hunter Committee, the Government of India and His Majesty’s Government of the time, which officially dealt with the matter, and to pronounce a public absolution upon the actions of General Dyer and Sir Michael O’Dwyer, the learned Judge ignored the defence of ‘fair comment’ raised by Sir Sankaran Nair in his pleadings. In para 6 of his defence, Sir Nair specifically pleaded that “the said words were a fair and bona fide comment on matters of public interest, viz., the conduct of the plaintiff as Lieutenant-Governor of Punjab and of the Government of India, particularly in Punjab, and that the said words were published without notice and the publication thereof was for the public benefit.” In his summing up, while the Judge dwelt time and again, with irrelevant and objectionable emphasis, on “the incorruptibility, absolute honesty and efficiency of military and civil officers”, he altogether forgot that the aforesaid epithets applied with far greater force to Sir Nair and that the latter’s plea was that he had used the words complained of only by way of a fair and bona fide comment on a matter of great public interest. It is a well-known rule of the law of libel that a fair comment on a matter of public interest is no libel. The words may be in themselves libelous, but as soon as they are shown to be a fair and bona fide comment on a matter of great public interest, they cease to be actionable.