In November 2013, Mint profiled Maheshwer Peri, former president and publisher of the Outlook group and founder of Careers360 magazine, in which it quoted him on why he decided to take on Arindam Chaudhuri, self-styled management guru and head of the Indian Institute of Planning and Management:

“Why do all these people survive?” he said, of institutions like IIPM. “Because there is no stamina from the common man or even from a big organization like yours or mine to fight these cases to the end. If someone stands up and says, ‘I will take this to its logical end,’ these guys will be over. You need someone who has information, access, power and intelligence. That’s me completely. These people have been going around filing cases and settling them and ensuring that no one opens their mouth.” “I am saying that I will be the one to bell the cat. I am belling the cat,” he added.

On March 19, in response to questions from friends, Peri let it be known – almost casually – on Facebook that his legal battle with Arindam Chaudhuri had come to an end on January 22 when he came to know that the businessman had withdrawn all legal cases against him.

Before that, in 2014, deciding a public interest litigation filed by B Mahesh Sarma, editor of Careers360, the Delhi High Court ruled that IIPM could not call itself a “management institute”.

In 2015, after a series of negative orders in various courts, IIPM announced it was shutting down all its campuses.

The cat had clearly been belled.

But Peri chose to keep quiet for almost two months before finally pulling the curtain down on a long drawn-out legal drama that took place in court rooms across the country for six years, with multiple hearings and legal bills that cost him a fortune (the figure has been estimated to be in eight figures), in which he challenged every civil and criminal case thrown at him, defended and won each of them in various high courts.

In these times of "paid-news" and the might of the advertisers, not to mention such demeaning terms as “presstitutes” and “news traders”, the story of how Peri and his fledgling Careers360 took on one of the biggest and most visible advertisers among India's business schools is possibly the best advertisement for the triumph of the judicial process.

How Peri and Careers360 persisted in their follow-up with a series of hard-hitting stories despite facing a slew of legal cases filed all across the country, which finally culminated in their dragging IIPM to the Supreme Court for abuse of judicial process is an object lesson in endurance, perseverance and defiance for journalists and publishers pursuing stories in the face of adversity.

It is a story where a publication not just defended itself against all charges, and saved thousands of careers of students in the process, but also provided hope to those fighting the good fight against intimidatory legal tactics. That all this could be achieved through proper judicial process could not have come at a better time.

For those who came in late

The legal battle had its genesis in a business-school survey carried by Outlook magazine in 2003 that ranked IIPM in fourth place in terms of industry interface. IIPM had claimed 100% placements in its advertisements and in the data given to Outlook, but Peri says he was moved by a visit from a parent of one of IIPM’s students, who claimed his son had not been placed and remained unemployed despite having paid a large fee for the course.

More investigations revealed more such cases. Because IIPM refused to part with details of their claimed placements, Peri says he decided to drop it from rankings and came out with a notice in 2005 that Outlook would no longer rank IIPM as part of its business school surveys.

Meanwhile, IIPM’s media presence only increased on the strength of high-budget advertising campaigns. Peri announced his intention to bell the cat in June 2008:

Nothing has changed: the same old untrue or misleading fantastical claims about salaries, placement records being better than IIMs, world class education, professors from foreign universities...you name it! Students are placed at Planman, a sister concern, at higher salaries meant to jack up placement ratios and dumped/sacked within two months. “We students realised the problems just three months into the institute but all escape routes had closed,” says a student. Students who were paying Rs 1.25 lakh a semester earlier are now made to pay Rs 4 lakh for the entire year. Banks that give out loans are willing conspirators. The situation is by no means unique and applies to a whole lot of other “management” and “professional” institutes too. The racket flourishes only because no one is taking it head on.

Peri followed up the above in September 2008 with another article in Outlook where he was even more direct:

Articles with misleading facts are planted in the media, and come in handy for those who resort to advertisements to gain credibility. Business school rankings and awards are up for sale; the price is paid through advertisements.

Peri left Outlook to start Careers360 which published three articles [all three and other facts of the case are available here] against IIPM after successfully getting the Delhi High Court to modify an injunction against publication of these articles passed by a lower court.

That is when the legal battle was truly joined.

The following are edited excerpts of Peri’s Facebook post: