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Spectator...

Knowing that I’m going to open a can of worms, I say that reactions to Ram Jethmalani’s decision to defend Manu Sharma are more or less divided on gender grounds.

The brilliant men argue that a lawyer’s job is not to prejudge but defend even the indefensible, to put his own feelings aside and do his best regardless, to fulfil the commitment to his profession, to support the fact that no man is guilty until he has been proven so by a court of law and that a fair and free trial is the right of every individual, etc.

And the women — like women have always been saying — say, “Yes, of course, we hear your arguments, your semantics and your pedantry. We read the letter of the law; we believe in justice and can rise above prejudice and pre-judging.

And we, too, believe that subjectivity doesn’t take precedence over the law. But at the end of the day — we’re human — and even if Jethmalani has every right to accept the case, and do his best at defending Manu Sharma — what about his conscience, what about his morality as a human being, what about his own personal ethics? “Life is not so black and white after all,” the women say. “We inhabit a world where there are shades of grey…where sometimes we listen to what our hearts tell us…”

It is telling that in the tableaux of events following Jethmalani’s announcements, two leading female media personalities Barkha Dutt and Sagarika Ghose, have put forward more or less the above mentioned argument in print and on TV— and most male journos that I have spoken to stick to the point, “Why shouldn’t he? He’s perfectly within his right to defend any one he wants,” on Jethmalani.

In a similar vein, I noticed that the city’s legal fraternity, who came forward to defend Jethmalani just happened to be male.

“Every accused has a constitutional right to a fair trial and a defence lawyer of his choice. As a lawyer, Jethmalani is only doing his duty to take up the case of an accused and present all the facts before a competent court which will present the verdict,” said senior lawyer Adik Shirodkar, more or less expressing what I have described as the ‘male -stick- to -the- rules-approach’.

But some of these gender boundaries are not so water-tight: In his 50 years of practice, Shirodkar maintains that he has never taken up cases involving rape and kidnapping. Another lawyer, Nitin Pradhan, says he withdrew from the 1993 serial blasts case on grounds of disillusionment, and criminal lawyer Satish Maneshinde says he never takes up rape cases. “A lawyer is not supposed to carry his conscience to court — but we are also human,” he said to DNA.

Exactly what women have known all these years — it’s what’s human in us that makes us human!

s_malavika@dnaindia.net