'Mother India's' Sukhilala is alive and kicking!

“My father, aged 69, was retired and staying with me. He had a credit card since the last 15 years. He expired last year in October and since January this year, I have been harassed by phone calls from the bank claiming that there is an outstanding of Rs32,000 on his card. They want me to pay this outstanding. Is it legal for the bank to demand the dues of the father from his son? What should I do?” — Rajesh Batra (name changed), Gurgaon.

As soon as I saw this query on our ‘ask the expert’ section at Apnapaisa.com, the memory of the late Bollywood actor Kanhaiyalal (who played money lender Sukhilala in Mother India) flashed in my mind.

I always felt that Sukhilala — the villainous moneylender in old Hindi films — notably Mother India — extracting money from sons for loans taken by their father was more a caricature than the truth. But here was Rajesh with exactly the same dilemma in 2009.

Till now, I had thought that the tradition of passing the debt from one generation to
another was long dead since Independence. To rescue people like Rajesh, I consulted a few legal experts who gave me the low-down on this. 

First they corrected me about the Mother India analogy. In the movie, the father (Raj Kumar) had mortgaged his farmland for taking the loan. Hence, the repayment was forced from the heroine (Nargis) and her two sons because they were emotionally attached to that land and wanted it to be released from the moneylender’s clutches.

If Raj Kumar’s family had refused to pay, then the moneylender could have proceeded to take possession of the property and sell it to recover his dues along with interest.  In the case of Rajesh’s father, it was an unsecured loan, hence clearly this was not applicable.

Second, the bank only had the ability to proceed against the estate of the deceased.
So, Rajesh would be liable  for the credit card debt only  if he had inherited something from his father and that too, up to the value of what he had  inherited.

Acting in accordance, I wrote to Rajesh to check if  he had inherited anything  from his father. He replied that he had only inherited some  personal belongings (such as a copy of the Ramayan that his father had treasured his entire adult life) with almost nil economic value.

I told him to write to the bank giving all these details and if they still persisted, to file a complaint with both the RBI as well as the police for undue harassment. My lawyer friend also  advised him that he would have a good case for damages against the bank if they
persisted in trying to recover the money even after they  had been advised about the facts in this case.

Rajesh accepted the advice and wrote to the bank. Post that, the recovery calls from the bank stopped.  However, the story had an unexpected ending.  Rajesh checked with me whether his fathers name would show up as a defaulter in the credit bureau’s records.

I told him I was not sure of how the bureau dealt with records of people known to be deceased, but it was most likely that his father’s record would show up as a defaulter for the next 7 years.

This was not acceptable to Rajesh, who said his late father had never defaulted during his life. He decided that to ensure that his father’s name was not sullied anywhere, he would settle with the bank.  Last I heard, he was in the process of settling the bank’s dues to get the name of his father cleared.

For me, this was an extraordinary ending as it highlighted not just Rajesh’s love for the memory of his dead father, but also the efficacy of the newly established credit bureau to bring down the overall outstandings in the retail lending scenario. Hail the spirit and concern of people like Rajesh!

The writer is CEO, Apna Paisa, a search comparison engine for loans, insurance and investments.