A condemned auto-rickshaw driver in a Tamil Nadu jail wrote three hundred pages about the men who had used his business, handed the manuscript to his wife, and asked her to get it published. The fight over whether it could be printed produced one of the foundational privacy decisions in Indian constitutional law.
R. Rajagopal v. State of Tamil Nadu has been cited by more than a hundred and seventy later judgments. It established a right to privacy under Article 21 of the Constitution twenty-three years before the Supreme Court's celebrated ruling in Puttaswamy. Neither Auto Shankar nor his wife was a party to it.
Gowri Shankar was born on January 21, 1954 at Kangeyanallur, in Vellore. His father left the family for Odisha while he was at pre-university college, and in the early 1970s he came to Chennai wanting to work in films. He lived first in a slum in Mylapore and then in Thiruvanmiyur, a fast-growing area on the southern edge of the city, pedaling cycle rickshaws and then driving an auto-rickshaw, which is where the name he is remembered by comes from. Prohibition was in force, and he used the rickshaw to move illegal liquor. He found procuring women for men in Chennai who had money and position more profitable and less risky, because those men could keep the police off him, and his gang dealt with rivals either through the police or by killing them. The murder of a rival named Babu in the early 1980s, which was covered up, is said to have settled him in the trade.
He married several times. His first wife, Jagadeeswari, had four children with him, and accounts of his life say the marriage ended when she set herself on fire. His third wife, Lalitha, had been a performer at a cabaret club he frequented. The business is documented. The murders are a narrower thing, and they are where most accounts of this case go wrong.
Six people were murdered, and the fullest published account of how runs as follows. Lalitha left him for one of his friends, a pimp named Sudalaimuthu, and the two set up in the trade on their own. Shankar let mutual friends broker a reconciliation, and one night in October 1987 invited her to one of his houses in Periyar Nagar, killed her and buried her there, then rented the house to an elderly widow for 150 rupees. He told Sudalai that Lalitha was away on an all-India tour with a VIP, and two months later had him to dinner, got him drunk, strangled him, burned the body and threw the ashes into the sea; when the burn marks in the renovated house needed explaining he said meat had been roasted there. Sudalai's friend Ravi confronted him and was killed and buried outside the Periyar Nagar plot. Shankar said the digging had been to hide illicit arrack from a police raid, and posted a forged letter to Ravi's wife saying Ravi was in Mumbai.
By 1988 he had a house of several stories, cars and motorcycles, and connections that could fix almost anything. On May 29, 1988 three men from a rival gang, Sampath, Mohan and Govindaraj, came to him refusing to pay for his women and demanding protection money. He invited them into his den with a promise to pay, and his men beat them to death and buried them.
It was Sampath's wife, Vijaya, who brought him down. At the end of June she told the Mylapore police her husband was missing and that Shankar might be responsible. They sent her to the Thiruvanmiyur police, who arrested Shankar for causing a nuisance and let him go. She petitioned the governor, who ordered an inquiry, and the police told her to stop bothering them. She went to a journalist who lived next door, and his article suggesting the three men had been murdered led the inspector general of police to order a special inquiry. The bodies were recovered in 1989. Under interrogation Shankar confessed to those three killings and to the other three.
Most popular accounts of Auto Shankar say he murdered nine teenage girls. No court ever found that. The Supreme Court of India, in the judgment of October 7, 1994, recorded that "Shankar @ Gauri Shankar @ Auto Shankar was charged and tried for as many as six murders." Six is the number, and five of the six were men. Other versions in circulation say three men who tried to take one of his women, or his third wife and her lover along with three members of a rival gang; the last is closest to the account above. The judgment itself does not itemize the six.
The name Mohan carries a caution. A Mohan appears among the victims, and a Mohan appears in the court record as Shankar's brother, a co-accused. The published accounts treat them as different men, the one a member of the rival gang and the other part of Shankar's own, and Mohan is a very common name in Tamil Nadu.
His trial was at the Chengalpattu sessions court, and he did not sit through all of it. On August 20, 1990 he escaped from custody with five accomplices.
He was recaptured, and in 1992 those five were convicted of criminal conspiracy and of obstructing his lawful apprehension. Each got six months' rigorous imprisonment from the Chengai-Anna district judge, N. Mohandoss. Two of them were his brother Mohan and a man called Selva, also known as Selvaraj. The other three, Kannan, Balan and Rahim Khan, were jail wardens. The men who let him out worked there. Mohan had escaped from Chennai Central Prison in August 1990 and was caught in Pune on June 25, 1992; he was later convicted of the same six murders and given three life sentences.
On May 31, 1991 the sessions judge convicted him of six murders and sentenced him to death, along with two associates named Eldin and Shivaji. The Madras High Court confirmed the sentence on July 17, 1992. The Supreme Court dismissed his appeal on April 5, 1994, and a mercy petition to the President of India was still pending that October, when the court handed down the judgment his name is attached to.
The memoir had been written during 1991, in the Chengalpattu sub-jail, while he was under sentence of death. He gave it to his wife Jagdishwari with the knowledge and approval of the jail authorities, to pass to his advocate Chandrasekharan, with a request that it be published in the Tamil magazine Nakkheeran.
Nakkheeran announced it in May 1994 and ran the first installment under the title Shadowed Truth, billing it as Auto Shankar's dying declaration. What he had written named police officers and officials he said had protected his business and used it.
In June the magazine received a letter from the prison authorities. The serial, it said, was "not really written by Gauri Shankar but it is written by someone else in his name." Publishing in the name of a condemned prisoner was against prison rules. The power of attorney the magazine was relying on was unlawful. Legal action might follow, for blackmail.
The magazine stopped. Its editor and publisher, R. Rajagopal, went to the Madras High Court, lost, and petitioned the Supreme Court directly under Article 32. His counsel disputed the prison's account of the manuscript and argued that the authorities were afraid of what the memoir said about them.
Justice B. P. Jeevan Reddy's judgment went considerably further than the argument in front of him. It held that a citizen has a right to privacy protected by Article 21 and that a person's private life may not be published without consent, but that the acts and conduct of public officials in the discharge of their duties are open to comment and criticism, and that a public official cannot claim privacy over them. It also held that the press cannot be restrained in advance from publishing.
That balance is what the case is cited for, and it is why a dispute over a prisoner's manuscript became a cornerstone of Indian privacy law.
Auto Shankar was hanged at Salem Central Prison on April 27, 1995, aged forty-one. Accounts differ on whether Eldin and Shivaji went to the gallows with him.
In Tamil Nadu the case is still argued over, and the reason has little to do with the six people who died. A racket that supplied women to men with influence, a memoir naming them, a prison service insisting the memoir was forged, and a Supreme Court judgment that made the whole argument permanent. It is a better story with nine dead girls in it, and the nine dead girls are the part no court ever found.
Years later K. Vijay Kumar, then Tamil Nadu's additional director-general of police, told a seminar on crime and the media in Kerala that the cinema alone had made Shankar a criminal.