By Kumkum Chadha
Today he sits smug: like many times he has in the past. It is yet another day of “a win” in Court. The Delhi High Court recently dismissed a defamation case filed by IRS officer Sameer Wankhede against director Aryan Khan and his debut serial Ba***ds of Bollywood that was streaming on Netflix.
Wankhede, it may be recalled, had hit headlines when he arrested film star Shah Rukh Khan’s son Aryan, after a drug raid in Mumbai way back in 2021. Khan had then spent some time in jail.
Fast forward to the present when Wankhade took on Khan yet again and sought damages claiming that a scene in the series involves a man bearing his resemblance and thus targeted and ridiculed him.
It was Senior Advocate Rajiv Nayar’s legal prowess that perhaps led to dismissing Wankhede’s plea. Nayar was appearing for Netflix. When you win some and lose some, Nayar by his own admission is a poor loser: “I take loss to heart even now. Quite frankly I hate to lose”, adding that the “desperation is to succeed” in an exclusive interview to a national daily recently.
This is not Nayar’s first brush with either cinema, politics or celebrities for that matter. In the past producer-director Karan Johar had called him a halwai. Nayar threatened legal action and actually extracted an apology.
His connection with politics was more because of his father, but when he met Narendra Modi for the first time he asked his friend, lawyer-turned-politician, Arun Jaitley: “Yeh kaun hai” who is he?
As a lawyer, Nayar has handled cases for politicians: former chief minister and later governor ND Tewari and former chief minister Jagan Reddy: both “ a bonus” given that they were his route to Tirupathi. “My reverence for the deity stems from the fact that my father had vowed in Tirupathi that if he ever wrote a book he would donate the proceeds to the temple”. And he did do that when his book Between the Lines topped the charts.
Reiterating his and the family’s connect to Tirupathi, Nayar recalled: “Whenever I want some selfish help, I always appeal to the deity. So, when someone said I must appear for Jagan Reddy, I said: ‘O, I will get a great darshan’”. Ditto Tewari who was governor of Andhra Pradesh and each time the darshan was “more than a VIP could get”.
Currently, Nayar is pitched against film actor Karisma Kapoor and is fighting the inheritance case of her ex-husband Sanjay Kapur. Nayar is appearing for Kapur’s wife Priya.
For someone who started practising in courts over four decades ago, it is this case that has grabbed attention as few others did in the past. “My daughter tells me that she goes to a party and she is asked please ask your father to tell us about the Priya Kapur case. I go to a party and they say anything new on the Priya Kapur case? It is as if I have not done any other case in my life before and this is the only case that I have ever done and this to me is really ironical,” he said.
This “attention” so to speak is primarily because of the “Bollywood connect” the country has with the films and film stars. “It is really Karisma (Kapoor) moving the court that has generated so much interest. If it was someone else versus Priya it would not evoke so much publicity,” Nayar said, adding that it is “after all a small case”.
This probably fits in given that he has handled consequential cases “bigger and better” to quote him: “I have done the Ramkrishna Dalmia case who had 19 children and three wives and was much bigger”.
But back to celebrities and fighting those cases, Nayar said they are “high maintenance cases”. Ask him to decode and he says: “They demand maximum attention and they feel their case is the most important. You have to respond to every telephone call and every whatsapp message. It is like 24×7 with them,” he said.
Visibly mild-mannered, Nayar is often at his “aggressive best” in court. “I am not used to interruptions,” he had once told Senior Advocate Mahesh Jethmalani. Call it arrogance if you will, but Nayar is his father’s son—well-known journalist and author Kuldip Nayar, an identity he is proud to flag.
Had his father not been jailed during the Emergency, Rajiv’s professional path would indeed have been different. It was during those days that he saw first how “spineless” journalists were. “Nobody stood up and I thought that journalism is a profession I would rather give a miss”, adding that he “fell into law by accident”.
It goes to Nayar’s credit that he comes across as frank, forthright and candid—a trait he has inherited from his father. He calls his father “unhelpful” and his uncle, the late Justice Rajinder Sachchar “conservative”.
From admitting that he has, “from being idealistic become more materialistic and practical” to treading sensitive issues like the state of the judiciary, Nayar does not mince words. He said: “For a poor man it is very difficult to get justice. Between a celebrity’s case and a peon seeking justice, what do you think the court will choose?”.
He, however, disagrees about the scales of justice being tilted, but does add that there is a “greater emphasis on more important cases… a well-known case, a rich man’s case. That is the state of our judiciary”, Nayar said a bit ruefully.
That certainly is not the reason why he turned down the offer of being a judge even while using the excuse that he was averse to the “chain flush” in the bathrooms in government houses. “I didn’t want to be in a service” he recalled.
Even though he was born with the proverbial silver spoon, as a lawyer, Nayar did struggle to make it big. He started off in “a 100-feet office in a semi staff quarter” to what he terms as his “big move” to a tiny office in Connaught Place which had no bathroom. But once the upward movement began, there has been no looking back, he said.
From seeing Modi for the first time in Jaitley’s house to saying yeh kaun hai to now seeing him as the country’s prime minister, Nayar said: “At that time he was an ordinary worker, but today he has given stability and rid us of dynastic succession,” adding that there are areas of lack of freedom of speech that he differs on with Modi.
Like he does on his father’s love for Pakistan and going to Wagah border year after year with candles of peace, as it were. “I hated those weekends because my father insisted that we went. I only went once and said never again. I was not interested in spending a weekend at Wagah border,” he said. That notwithstanding he says he shares his father’s love for Pakistan. “There was this great connect between India and Pakistan which has suddenly disappeared. We have suddenly become enemies of each other,” he said.
Through his father, the family did “imbibe this love for Pakistan but I don’t think we were as passionate as my father was,” Nayar said adding that his father would have done what it takes to “bring India and Pakistan together”.
As for himself, Nayar feels there is a need to improve the bilateral relationship between the two countries. His take: “I still feel that an average Indian and an average Pakistani still want to be together, forget about terrorists and politics” he said before signing off.
—The writer is an author, journalist and political commentator
The post Rajiv Nayar’s Winning Streak: Celebrities, Courtrooms, and the Long Arc of Power appeared first on India Legal.