KB-2023-003636 - [2025] EWHC 2043 (KB)

It is, accordingly, not necessary to address the truth defence, but I do so, briefly, for completeness.

The resolution of the truth defence, in the context of the present case, requires an objective assessment of what the claimant was doing and what he said. This is not quite the same exercise as is involved in the determination of the meaning of the article. It is not necessary to have recourse to the hypothetical reasonable listener to his speech, or to divine a single meaning of the speech. What is required is to determine, objectively, what it is the claimant did and, in the light of that, to decide whether the defamatory imputation conveyed by the article is substantially true.

The description of the claimant as a “street agitator who has whipped up a mob on London’s streets” and as someone who “addressed an anti-Israel protest in inflammatory terms” is an accurate description of what the claimant is seen to do at the rally for Israel.

The claimant’s fundamental complaint is that it was completely wrong for the second defendant to say that the claimant had ridiculed Hindus. It is true that he did not use the word Hindus. However, it is common ground that he was talking about the opposing group of men who were involved in the disturbances. Once the claimant’s concept of non-Hindu Hindutva is rejected as an unreal construct, everyone who was present (including the claimant) understood that group to be largely, if not overwhelmingly, composed of Hindu men. It was them that he was ridiculing. He did so not by picking on a feature that defines the Hindutva but instead by picking on an aspect of Hinduism (reincarnation), after first asserting the superiority of Islam (“we got the truth”). He, in terms, described them (that is, the Hindu men) as “pathetic, weak and cowardly” such that he would “rather be an animal.” That speech, to a large group of excitable and engaged masked young men, exacerbated the tensions that had spilled over into serious public disorder the previous day.

Even if it were necessary to determine what the claimant subjectively intended to do (and it is not), the truth defence would be established. The claimant knew exactly what he was doing. He chose his words deliberately. He did so in a way that left him room to put forward “innocent” explanations, but those explanations do not withstand scrutiny.

It follows that even if the claimant had succeeded in showing that he had suffered serious reputational harm as a result of the article, the claim would fall to be dismissed because the defendants have established that the defamatory imputation conveyed by the article is substantially true.