The claim was that I bought the degree and hadn’t done any work, that I knew it was a fraudulent degree and I did it to deceive the public I asked [the newspaper] to withdraw the allegations Instead they republished them again and again. Eventually, reluctantly, I had to take legal action to stop them because it was damaging my reputation.”Mr McKenna was awarded costs and the judge ordered the newspaper to make an interim payment of £75,000 Damages will be settled in October.. The university was tarnished but I did not just hand over a cheque and get a degree I did the work for it and the university is licensed. He added that it was necessary to recall how little Mr McKenna knew about the academic world. The self-help expert had told the court his early academic career was not successful – he got two O-levels, one CSE and an A-level in art.Speaking to Sky News, Mr McKenna said: “It was not just me – 15,000 other students were defrauded. Mr McKenna, 42, from west London, said he was exempted from seven course units because of his prior learning over 10 years and had produced an original thesis.
His counsel said that, whatever the criticism of La Salle’s standards, it was not a “diploma mill”.The judge said that one of the clearest indications of Mr McKenna’s sincerity was his determination to pursue the legal case. “Mr McKenna was not, in my judgment, dishonest and, for that matter, whatever one may think of the academic quality of his work, or of the degree granted by La Salle, it would not be accurate to describe it as ‘bogus’. It was certainly not granted ‘merely’ for money (or even ‘in effect’ merely for money),” he said.Mr McKenna’s counsel, Desmond Browne QC, said his client only became aware that La Salle was a fraudulent creation of its founder in 1996, after he had submitted his final project for a hypnotherapy doctorate. Mr McKenna, whose self-help business has an annual turnover of £2.5m, brought the action against the Daily Mirror, claiming its columnist Victor Lewis-Smith had “pilloried” him for six years, culminating in a mention in 2003 of his “bogus degree”, a PhD from La Salle University in Louisiana.
In the newspaper article, Mr Lewis-Smith said: “I discovered that anyone could be fully doctored by La Salle within months (no previous qualifications needed) just so long as they could answer the following question correctly: Do you have $2,615, Sir?” The newspaper’s publishers, who denied libel and pleaded justification, called evidence from Mr Lewis-Smith’s co-writer Paul Sparks who said La Salle offered a doctorate for that fee within months and without any formal course.At the High Court in London yesterday Mr Justice Eady ruled against the paper, saying he did not believe the hypnotist was dishonest and that his work was not bogus. In Butter Chicken in Ludhiana he transmutes these experiences into a brilliant polemic; in Temptations he is defeated by them. The hypnotist Paul McKenna has won his libel action against a national newspaper which claimed he had knowingly bought a bogus degree to boost his career. A pity.Pavan K Varma is director general of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations and author of ‘Being Indian’ (Arrow).
Why this should be so is not clear, because Mishra does not exactly belong to the great exploited masses he conjures up so often. I suspect his distaste for the pretensions and deceit of the small towns in India where he grew up overly colours his vision. Mishra writes well; his narrative powers are exceptional; and his profiles of ordinary people all over the subcontinent make for good reading. But these talents are marred by his inability to overcome the judgments he has already come to about India while living in London, where he confesses “he knew security and stability for the first time”.
Thousands of Indian soldiers and hundreds of officers went to certain death in dislodging the invaders. It is inconceivable that Mishra is not aware of this, but that he chooses not to take it into account says a great deal about the biases he has uncritically internalised.The book has redeeming features. To argue that Pakistani troops evacuated the heights of Kargil in Indian Kashmir in 1999 only because the US put pressure on Islamabad is an unforgivable distortion. And the Bharatiya Janata Party, whose cadres spearheaded the destruction of the mosque in 1992, has been out of power in UP since 1996.Any observer who chooses to write on India must be very vigilant about stereotypes.