Comment

There’s always the uncertainty of the appeal to the Supreme Court but, at least for now, two slain young women have received some kind of justice. Manu Sharma, sentenced to life for killing Jessica Lall, has begun serving his sentence in Tihar jail, while Santosh Singh, the rapist-murderer of Priyadarshini Mattoo, has been sentenced to death. The verdicts, of course, aren’t going to bring either Jessica or Priyadarshini to life, but they have halted the downward spiral of our belief in the legal system.

But, there are some ‘buts’. To start at the beginning: Why did the lower courts, after hearing the same testimony and looking at the same evidence as the High Court, dismiss the cases against the killers and set them free? In another high-profile affair, how did the lower court absolve Navjot Singh Sidhu of manslaughter when that, too, was such a clear-cut case? The man would have gone on forever ranting and raving on our TV screens if the High Court hadn’t stepped in there as well.

If the lower rungs of the judiciary are so very incompetent, what’s being done about it? The High Courts, in these and many other cases, pass the severest strictures against
the concerned magistrates; but, apart from those slaps on the wrist, what action is taken? As far as one can tell, none. In fact, the magistrate who freed Manu Sharma has been promoted to the High Court! Luckily, he is still serving his probationary period, so let’s hope someone will go beyond routine practice and not confirm him.

Will any action be taken against the police officials who, clearly, botched up many of these investigations? No prosecutor, however able and committed, can get a conviction if the evidence collected is weak. And, in case after case, it is police officials who deliberately or out of negligence bungle the collection of evidence. There has been a lot of self-congratulation in the media for keeping these cases alive for years, but these pats-on-the-back will be justified only when the media follows the cases to their conclusion and ensures that action is taken against errant/inefficient police officials and magistrates.

There’s another important point that has been obscured by the media’s self-congratulations and the general euphoria of the changed verdicts. That point is this: What happened in Khairlanji? If you asked, “Khairlanji? What’s that?” you can’t be blamed, because this village in Maharashtra hasn’t featured too prominently in either our newspapers or on TV channels. Yet there were as many people killed here as in the Jessica Lall, Priyadarshini Mattoo, Nitish Kataria and Navjot Singh Sidhu cases combined.

This is where we come up against the uncomfortable truth of our selective concern for justice. The four people murdered at Khairlanji were two men and two women from one family. But that family was Dalit. I am not implying that this is a caste thing. It isn’t; it’s a class thing. Those four could have been from any caste at all, and it wouldn’t have mattered, because what matters is that they did not belong to the middle-class. And all our famous victims belong, very, very definitely, to the middle-class.

There are several reasons for this. A middle-class victim looks better, both in press photographs and on television screens, than a poor, malnourished villager. A middle-class victim also evokes horrified sympathy because we say to ourselves, “That could have been me” (or my father/mother/son/ daughter). Then there’s the unalterably sad fact that Dalits and tribals and poor villagers have been killed in large numbers over the years, so another killing is…well…just another killing, nothing out of the ordinary. Since the media is owned by the middle-class and is run by the middle-class for the middle-class, such a bias is understandable. But is it justified? And shouldn’t it change?

As it happens, the recent Dalit violence in a number of stateswas, on the surface, about the desecration of an Ambedkar statue. The statue actually only provided the spark needed to light a fire: the fuel was incidents like Khairlanji which have been piling up, one after another, for years and years, with no signs of redressal or justice. How can there be, when the police themselves refuse to even register a case, so that there is then no investigation, no court case and no conviction? And if, miraculously, all these hurdles are overcome, and the killers are actually brought to trial, where will they be tried? In the lower courts, of course, and we know what that can mean.