Fight for justice

For the most part, people have faith in the Indian judiciary for being fair, even if the process is interminably slow. But cases like this one which grips national attention and severely shake that faith. Many will have forgotten the original incident which took place in 1990 — a 14-year-old girl, Ruchika Girhotra, a rising tennis player accuses a senior Haryana police officer of molesting her in his office. The girl and her family are harassed to the point that she kills herself in 1993. The officer, Shambhu Pratap Singh Rathore, rises to become a director general of police. Now, 19 years later, Rathore is sentenced to six months by a CBI court.

The case has every element to disgust civil society — a young girl, a hapless family, a powerful policeman backed by powerful politicians and a corrupt system. The rage which we see now is similar to that which grew around the Jessica Lal case — why is justice so difficult for the common man when the perpetrator is close to power centres? What happened to equality before the law and justice for all? Do we lose faith in the system completely or is there an answer?

In Ruchika’s case, the matter reached as far as it did because the girl’s best friend never gave up. All the threats of the police force, the attempts to scuttle and hush up the case, the fears felt by the family were channelled into getting a result. The six-month sentence is a slap in the face for all that effort, but a movement is now on to re-open the case.

The extent of the corruption of the system ought not to be a shock any more — but in some sense it is heartening that we are still outraged. We know that people are innocent until proven guilty, but when a person accused of a crime attempts to harass his accusers and subvert the system then he commits greater sins that what he was originally accused of. It is obviously naïve to expect a police officer to uphold the law but the manner in which the law was ignored in this case shows the Haryana police and government in extremely poor light.

Like the Jessica Lal case, Ruchika’s untimely death and her family’s trauma have become one more lodestone by which the average Indian citizen — the aam aadmi — can judge the system. The onus is now on the police force, the government and the judiciary to prove that justice can and will be done in India, that the victim is not always punished twice and that the powerful cannot get away with murder by using their connections. The picture of Rathore laughing as he left the courtroom has cut deep into the public consciousness. The powerful have to accept that this is no laughing matter.