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ShareThere has been a lot of outrage in the Jessica Lal case. But how about a little anger for Shankardayal Singh? Shankardayal Singh, who? He is one of our country's faceless people for whom no one gives a damn. Yet his case is more representative of our legal system than Jessica Lal's.
Shankardayal lived in Maswasi village in UP. He was a man of violent temper which led him one day to assault a neighbour over a minor dispute. The neighbour was only injured but he was a brahmin, while Shankardayal was low-caste, so upper caste villagers ensured that Singh was jailed. He has recently been released. Amongst those who welcomed him back was his brahmin neighbour who can't even remember what their argument was about. But, then, the fight took place a long time ago. A very long time ago. Forty five years ago in fact.
Shankardayal went into the labyrinths of our legal system as a young man, and came out old and infirm, with a whole life-time gone by. He was beaten in jail, which made him even more violent, which led him to a mental asylum, where he was forgotten for 30 years. Then somebody remembered to certify him sane, and he was sent back to jail. Only a story in a local Hindi newspaper set him free.
Would this happen to anyone who wasn't poor? Most clearly not, yet it happens again and again to those without the means, or the knowledge, to take on the system.
Or, rather, systems. We think of our legal system as one monolithic whole, when in fact it's a composite of a number of parallel systems. At the bottom layer, there is the system for the Shankardayals of the world, which isn't a system at all because there's no money in it. Here, factors like caste, local affiliations and hierarchies determine who the law enforcers will determine is guilty.
The next layer is where the middle class takes on the middle class in litigation. Here, again, money isn't a factor, but since there is a basic awareness of the law and of legal rights, litigation carries on in an orderly, if cumbersome, manner.
Then comes the "top" layer when the rich and the powerful take on the rest. Until now it was thought that the high and the mighty could get away literally with murder, as long as the victims were poor. Say like Salman Khan or Puru Raj Kumar killing pavement dwellers while driving drunk. But as the Jessica Lal case shows, the really wealthy or those with serious clout can also get away even when the victims are high-profile and have access to legal help.
At a recent cultural event which took place on the day of the Jessical Lal verdict, the wife of one of Mumbai's senior-most officers was in a state of anguish. "Look what our judiciary is coming to," she wailed. The IPS officer smiled at her in benign agreement. Yet we all know in the minutest detail that the Delhi police deliberately botched up the investigation. Yet here was this IPS officer completely blinkered about the wrongdoings of his own department.
But why blame him? The Delhi top brass who were directly connected knew what was happening: KK Paul, now Delhi's police chief, then Joint Commissioner (Crime) was asked to probe the suspicion that the case investigators were in collusion with the accused. His findings were damning, yet nothing was done. Given the nature of the case, couldn't the Commissioner of Police throw out the investigators and put the Joint Commissioner in charge? The suspicious mind, and we have no shortage of them in our country, will see a huge conspiracy in all this, but I am not prepared to accept a scenario in which the whole Delhi police force was involved in a cover up. I see something far simpler: the police chief was as blinkered as his colleague in Mumbai (they are the ones who let the Daya Nayaks flourish). For the blinkered mind, everything is chalta hai; everything is routine. Until the explosion happens when it's too late to do anything except a post-mortem.
The suspicious mind will also see a conspiracy in the elevation of the Jessica Lal judge to the High Court a mere four days after his astonishing judgement. But to me the promotion of Additional Sessions judge SL Bhayana is yet another case of the same blinkered vision, the same unhurried chalta hai attitude. Bhayana's promotion must have been in the pipeline for months. Yet the blinkered vision did nothing to stop it when he gave a judgement which showed that he was incompetent. (And that's putting the best light on it).
The Jessica Lal case, sadly, isn't the first abortion of justice in our country. ("Miscarriage" is accidental, "abortion" is deliberate). Even more sadly, it won't be the last. That's because no one, no police chief, no home ministry official and no judge really seems to care. For them, life, routinely, goes on.
