Man is the noblest of animals, but separated from law and justice, he is the worst, warned Aristotle. At a distance of nearly sixty years from the event that made his name known, it can be said that Commander Nanavati, while seeming noble to some, represented that worst.
On April 27, 1959, when Kawas Manekshaw Nanavati put his arms around his wife, Sylvia, and she rebuffed him, he was discomfited. When she explained that she was in love with another man, had been intimate with him and wanted to marry him, he was deeply perturbed. They had been married for ten years and had three children, and the paramour was a known person, Prem Bhagwandas Ahuja.
To be cheated is not nice. You love someone and think you have the one to yourself, only to find that the person cares for someone else and is sleeping with him or her. For a man, there are the added elements of pride and pretension. To be cuckolded is humiliating. You feel you want to kill the guy.
But you don't. That is the whole point of being civilized. You divorce the person and go your way. Or you swallow pride and live on with the person. Embrace her in lukewarm acceptance or even love her with her perfidious imperfection. 'Honour killing' is vulgar and dishonourable.
Urban India is rapidly coming face to face with marital infidelity. Hindustan Times reported in 2015 that divorces had doubled or tripled in major cities in the three previous years; the presence of a third person was often the reason. The Times of India reported a survey of 75,000 people, four-fifths married, in 2014 that showed an astounding 61 per cent of men and 76 per cent of women did not find infidelity particularly sinful or immoral.
Nanavati was made of sterner stuff. In a jealous rage, he went to his ship, lied to a colleague and obtained a Smith and Wesson and six cartridges. He was a trained marksman and knew he would not need more. He went to Ahuja's apartment, barged into his bedroom and pumped three bullets into the man. Then he went to a police station and told what he had done.
He was, as an observer later to become the country's law minister, said, "an honest man, until he met his lawyers". Coached by his lawyers, he claimed he had gone to Ahuja only to ask whether he would marry Sylvia, though Sylvia must have already told him of their serious intention. Why take a gun for such a discussion? Because, he said, Ahuja might bring out his gun, except that Ahuja never had a gun. Did he shoot Ahuja? No, it went off accidentally during a scuffle. Thrice in a scuffle? The gun wasn't even an automatic one. How did they have a discussion and a scuffle all in a minute? There were three eye witnesses that the murder occurred in less than a minute.
The most significant statements were by Nanavati himself before he talked to his lawyers. To a guard and a colleague, both unambiguous witnesses, he stated that he had shot Ahuja because Ahuja had 'connected' with his wife. The autopsy and ballistic studies showed that is exactly what he had done - a calculated murder.
None of the evidence mattered, however, when the case opened in the sessions court in Mumbai. The whole country seemed to be rooting for Nanavati, who was seen as a hero protecting his family and honour than as a jilted, jealous man who lost self-control and petulantly shot an unarmed man his wife loved. He wasn't even in jail, but appeared daily, groomed and in naval regalia, from comfortable navy detention, an emblem of male virtue that had crushed a lecherous Lothario. Men showered high-value bills on him, women their admiration and affection.
The jury voted overwhelmingly that Nanavati was innocent. The acclamation was thunderous. The judge, Ratilal Bhaichand Mehta, was not amused and declared the verdict perverse, one that reasonable people could not reach based on the evidence. The high court reviewed the evidence and sentenced Nanavati to jail for life; the Supreme Court confirmed the decision.
Followed a maelstrom of histrionics and hypocrisy, insinuation and innuendo, sensationalism and sanctimoniousness. How could a national hero be behind bars? Nobody cared to read Justice K. Subbarao's masterly analysis of the evidence, especially Nanavati's conduct before, during and after the event, showing how improbable was any hypothesis save that of a planned murder. Nanavati had hardly settled in his cell, before he was pardoned by Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, the state governor and sister of Prime Minister Nehru. He was released, got a lucrative job, then shortly emigrated to Canada with Sylvia and the children. He died in 2003.
Few emerged unscathed from the affair.
The press, completely dominated by Blitz's Russi Karanjia, distorted rather than represented the reality and daily fed rumours and irrelevancies to the public. Even today, practically every report on the affair cites the defence lawyers' concoctions rather than the salient facts of the case.
The judiciary looked inept and helpless at preventing a gross miscarriage of justice, although the high court later restored the balance. The jury system was hurriedly abolished, the victim of a quick and thoughtless overreaction.
The armed forces, especially the navy, seemed unable or unwilling to distinguish between gracious support for an unfortunate and blind endorsement of a miscreant.
The Parsi community, which had several discriminating leaders and legal luminaries, seemed singularly indiscriminate in its backing of a wayward Parsi and let the trial be a show of strength between the Parsis and the Sindhis, the victim's community. The Tatas advanced their popularity but not their reputation by promptly offering a well-paid position to Nanavati.
Outrageously, the government showed by its brazen pardon that if you know the right people, in this instance the Nehru family and the defence minister, Krishna Menon, you can literally get away with murder. India has always endured the ignominy of being a place where everything - absolutely everything, however shocking or shameless - can be done with the appropriate contacts, and the Nanavati affair certainly reinforced the image.
Even more outrageously, Indian society implicitly declared that honour killing is all right if someone dares to touch your prime property, your woman. Bollywood has thrice covered the story, Nanavati played heroically by leading stars such as Sunil Dutt, Vinod Khanna and, more recently, Akshay Kumar. It was the essential thread running through thousands of letters written at the time and even now defending Nanavati. Respect for women meant placing them on a well-fenced pedestal; they are not free to choose or change whom they love. A man's role is to defend that pedestal, at whatever cost, and prove his machismo. Doubtless this kind of thinking will linger in some sections of society, but the Nanavati release placed an official stamp on the apotheosis of spurious masculinity and the perception of women as propertied chattel.
Sylvia perhaps emerged the worst. A pretty English girl, she married an Indian at 18, lived ill-at-ease with a mother-in-law in a country she was never at home, had practically no friends, produced and reared three children in quick succession, and met somebody she loved and wanted to marry, only to find him murdered by her husband.
All that was left to her was to continue in a loveless marriage with a man she now knew to be a jealous killer, stand uncomfortably in the witness box at the bidding of his lawyers, and be told in open court that, having lost her lover, she was obliging her spouse. Still remained the chore, on Nanavati's release, of moving to a third land, unknown and friendless, and adjusting in middle age to a new existence. One hopes Sylvia, in her eighties, had some peace in the end.
The author is an international development specialist based in Washington
