Salman Khan hit-and-run-case: A double role and the path to justice

With the Bombay High Court suspending Salman Khan's sentence till the disposal of his appeal against the conviction and five year sentence order, for a fatal hit and run case, it gives rise to the oft-repeated question: does the judiciary bend laws conveniently to help the affluent? Generally, in any conviction over three years, the convict has to be transferred to jail immediately and no court listens to a bail application the same day. Would a truck driver similarly convicted have a chance to be heard in the High Court within hours of a lower court conviction?

Is the judiciary influenced by the affluent and the powerful? Such a charge has been made against the judiciary from time to time. This is due to the fact that in many cases that have shocked the nation, the police, the powerful and the rich have conveniently been given the benefit of doubt. The most recent case is that of the Hashimpura killings in which all the policemen accused of killing 43 Muslim men in cold blood were acquitted, ostensibly for lack of evidence, although there was sufficient evidence detailing their abduction and subsequent killings.

Why is it that the benefit of doubt often eludes the under classes? In the 'Mathura rape case' of 1980, in which policemen accused of raping a Dalit woman were acquitted despite clinching evidence, four eminent law professors, Upendra Baxi, Lotika Sarkar, Vasudha Dhagamwar and Raghunath Kelkar wrote a letter to the Supreme Court accusing it of backing the affluent and the powerful. The letter famously known in jurisprudence as the Open Letter "critiqued the Supreme Court for offering legal redress only to the affluent, urban and educated women, while it condemned the illiterate, labouring, politically mute Mathuras of India to their pre-constitutional Indian fate," according to Pratiksha Baxi in her pivotal study of rape trials in India Public Secrets of Law. In the Bhanwari Devi rape case, where justice continues to elude the victim, the trial court acquitted the accused men, observing that they were middle-aged and respectable persons of a "higher caste" and could not have raped a "lower caste" woman.

Salman Khan being granted bail also tangentially points to the larger issue of the national mindset. We love to make examples of the poor, the vulnerable and minorities while we shrink wrap the elite with the foils of faux morality. The trial of the Nirbhaya rape case, was concluded in about eight months and death sentences were duly handed out. This appeals to large sections of India's elite, and fittingly for the middle class, the accused were from the lowest segments of society. But criminal cases involving the elite classes, including the one of rape involving a senior journalist, do not come to trial for several years, thereby rendering the entire judicial process more or less irrelevant.

The fact that Salman Khan could delay the case for nearly 13 years is a classic example of how the rich and powerful manage to subvert the cause of justice. Soon after the accident, Salman Khan is said to have threatened a journalist who blogged the story of the policeman who was a crucial witness in the case. The policemen was hounded and sacked from service and died a beggar's death unknown and unsung despite his gallantry and courage. But we prefer faux courage of cinematic hulks to real life courage of ordinary people.

And as a cover up, Salman Khan built an ornate façade and over the last ten years changed his testosterone hero image to that of a bleeding heart by starting non-profit charitable works for the sick. This is over and above his manufactured persona of the good man who, wearing khakhi or torn jeans disposes off the evil "other' while we egg him on.

The Indian chatteratti, especially the Mumbai tinsel darlings, completely accepted his image makeover. The poor man who was killed by a drunken Salman was easily airbrushed off our collective consciousness. After Salman's conviction, many of Mumbai's glitterati rubbished the poor who slept on its streets, as if Mumbai, where ten billionaires reside, provides them other options.

More often, we give the elite the benefit of doubt because to put a heroic hulk on whom "Rs 200 crores" is riding is not acceptable to us. It is this societal yearning that helps keep Salman out of jail. A drunken truck driver on the other hand would have been dispatched post haste to jail after conviction with an accompanying note of triumphalism. Needless to say, quite often it is the upper crust of society that gets the benefit of doubt because we do not want to make an example of our holy hulks who star in various morality plays in which the good triumphs over evil. So, if Salman Khan is in jail, who will hold aloft the flag of goodness, purity, divinity for five long years while the Great Indian middle class is starved of such shrink-wrapped nobility?