Truth Unlocked

 

What separates us from the rest of our fellow inhabitants of earth is that while doing most of the things that every living being does we seek justice in response to any hurt feeling or loss accruing on account of these activities. Justice! So to save the civil society from the blatant outrage born of our rampant passions, we have structured the notions of crime, redemption, justice, good, bad, moral and immoral.

Unlike other species that are led by the limitations of natural instincts for survival, we humans have motivations beyond mere survival. We have our set of choices that drive our activities in a way that these can shape our primal instincts into goodness reaching the heaven and badness touching the hell.

Justice, alas, has been the unattainable goal so far. During those long and protracted legal battles, the intention of redemption to the victim and punishment to the wrong-doer repeatedly gets severe jolts. Our partisan, bipolar system ensures that despite the best of intentions, the legal system is again and again undone by the class differential. Here again, the rich, famous and the powerful outsmart the investigating agencies. It proceeds as per the ‘law of the survival of the fittest’ to ensure that the less privileged find judiciary almost unresponsive to their plight.

****

In the early fifties of the past century, a crime was committed in the nondescript surroundings of countryside. A zamindar’s accountant raped a peasant girl. For generations it had been going on like this. However, what made it a crime on this occasion was the fact that this time the victim lodged an FIR. Given his status, the zamindar won’t have allowed his munsi even to be arrested. A zealous officer, however, ensured that the arrest was carried out. Fearing that the relatively rich and powerful accountant—with the help of his master—would hijack the law, the officer tried his best to hold the baton of criminal justice firmly.

Nonetheless, we have an over-lenient and over-precautious system with its own oath of ‘not guilty till proven so’. Unfortunately, in its frenzied and deadly focused provisions to save every single innocent human being, it has been letting go scot-free thousands of wrong-doers, for the provisions that save an innocent person save many criminals at the same time.

There is mammoth area of discretion in the hands of law functionaries at every stage. Justice says, ‘I will base myself on the presumption of the witnesses not lying under the oath’; Criminal Procedure Code hesitatingly seems to say, ‘Commit a crime but don’t leave any circumstantial evidence.’

Justice has based itself on so many flimsy grounds: the witness—they turn hostile very easily, in fact it is the most expected turn of events in any case; evidence—it can be easily destroyed and fabricated. It can be easily presumed—as per the laws of class structure—the higher class involved in the case easily takes the justice establishment in its tow after cleanly, legally fulfilling most of the terms and conditions of police and judiciary. And like the mankind’s eternal quest for truth, the ‘quest for justice’ also remains elusive like ever before.

It happened exactly so in this case also. The supposed objectivity in the system’s functioning was easily hijacked. Many people had seen her being dragged away but nobody turned up as a witness. It put the entire onus on the victim to prove that she had been raped. The investigating officer, the inspector whom the zamindar invited to his night-long drunken regalia of music, dance and debauchery, smartly came with the report that the doctor’s observation does not find any signs of rape, rather the semen strains of her lover were found on her person.

During those days, the forensic investigations were yet to shine as brightly as these days to lay bare the dark strains of the evil-doer. As to the torn clothing that could have proved that she had been raped, the said crucial evidence was nowhere to be found. In reality, the rapist had burned her poor clothes and then turned her out of the barn naked to go beseeching justice for her wronged self. God behold the criminal jurisprudence because given the social taboo only the rarest of the rare rape case was reported during those days (out of the numerous happening around) and these solitary ones too became victim to the justice miscarriage.

****

Unbothered about this injustice, the time simply fled off. And now we come to the next decade. At the time of his crime, the accountant had a little daughter. Like all good and bad people, he dearly loved the little star of his mediocre household. The memory how he had committed a crime against a girl from the huts was long past him.

Skyrocketed by the generations of exploitation, the local landowner now had shifted to the city with gold pieces in lieu of the tears of the labour class. Here they had diversified the business to turn richer and more famous. The accountant was a manager of one of the master’s establishments. His girl fully blossomed like a girl should under comfortable conditions. She now studied in a college. The master’s son, with whom she had played in her childhood, now eyed her with the passion of first love’s purity and unadulterated possessiveness. It but became a crime given the earth-sky difference between the families.

‘She is the daughter of a wretched, servile, poor, rapist servant of ours, whom I once saved to enable him to continue surviving on our crumbs!’ the city-level famous father thundered.

However, it was that stage of love wherein the couple’s eyes emanated such light that they turned blind to everything around. Overexcited and no longer able to bear separation they eloped. Given his resources and reach he tracked them down. But only the boy was brought back, heartbroken and almost shackled like a prisoner. In his mourning, he didn’t know what happened to his wife—as he called her now—and how he had been brought back home.

The girl’s father was now at odds against a superior foe. He was not in a position to confront him personally. As law is the refuge of the weak (and suitable ladder to go higher to the strong), he went prostrating before the court to plead justice.

****

To say that judiciary has absolute powers would be quite justified. There are no checks and balances and in its safe corridors—for corruption, extortion and manipulation—thousands of weaklings cringe perpetually to get justice. There are hardly any checks and balances which can bracket, define or limit the system of justice at all levels from sending out verdicts based on most unjustified—but soundly authenticated by the stamp of legality through tempering, bribing, threatening—of occurrences and mishaps.

The conduct of a judge is not to be raked; he cannot be held responsible for the verdict as a human being. However, his verdict can be safely—from his point of view—revoked by the higher judiciary. The dispenser of justice is always beyond any scrutiny. His act may be trashed but not him. Even while a lower court’s verdict is overruled by a higher one, the latter does not find anything farcical, contemptuous or immoral in the former’s judgement.

The judge is accepted to be beyond any strain of susceptibility. So if a judgement is not upheld by the superior judiciary, it is from the point of view of insufficiency of implementation and application of laws. So the judgement (effect) becomes erroneous, leaving the black robe of justice (cause) spotlessly clean. No wonder, there are malpractices which stand clean on the scale of constitutionality. 

The legal fraternity boasts of its black gown! What a choice of colour! Pour any quantity of filth on it, it but will remain the same! The politicians perched at the highest level wield the rein in their safe hands. They directly indirectly recommend the names of the judges. In most of the cases in which some hapless individual is pitted against the mighty institution of the government, the very same lawyers whom that meek fellow hires at an exorbitant rate to defend his interest against a belligerent state dupe his client covertly—in majority of the cases—and hobnob with the governmental agencies. It happens so frequently that it virtually becomes a rule with law and judiciary.

Higher the treason to the real spirit of a common man’s justice-seeking cause, the greater the rewards, including appointments to the posts of judges. It won’t be surprising to find a practising lawyer suddenly sitting as a judge—the tier of his seat being directly proportional to the treason or compromise with morality.

****

The unfortunate father whose daughter was missing ran from pillar to post for two months. The report had been filed against the rich and famous by the lesser mortal. And who cared for such non-issues during those days, after all the belligerent media of the 21^st century was a far cry when even the radio news was out of reach to the masses. The city police colluded with the accused. How could they dare to bring him to the books for he, to add little contribution to the general rot of the system, was in hand-in-glove with the local politicians and musclemen.

The sessions judge tried to play a proactive role to ensure conviction and find the truth. But if one cog hasn’t been corrupted, the other can be tried. In this case, the stronger party had a go at the police and they systematically and diligently weakened the case. The police produced the accused before the court with much flimsy and untenable evidence—as if it were acting like defense. This help plus an astute amount of legal time purchased by the rich man made such a weighty defense statement that the judge, fully convinced of the accused’s hand in some wrongdoing, merely ogled in shock, despair, resignation and helplessness while granting bail. He knew the important and defining role of police in ensuring conviction. The fact here was that the girl was missing, but the police was investigating the case from a partisan, biased and improper angle. As the case went ahead, he just stared in mock exasperation at the deliberate lapses in the functioning of police regarding the missing girl.

Nevertheless, the quest for truth and justice was the court’s duty, so despite the severe handicaps of the system, the honourable judge continued to put pressure on the police to find the truth behind the missing girl. However, the path to truth was obstructed by the best of legal advisors. These are the luminaries who can make and break witnesses and turn the truest of evidence into most pathetic nonentity or change a speck of dust into something that can make or break a life. Under their sustained and dexterous onslaught, the judge had to quell the spirit of justice and he declared the accused free and innocent for lack of any tangible evidence. The puzzle of the missing girl was left as an open riddle so that people could ask the question, ‘What happened to her?’

Her father and their well-wishers were devastated. Their combined baggage of grudges went somewhat like this:

‘...money and muscle power has ensured miscarriage of justice...she was such a charming nice girl, look it has hardly led to shock and anger against the farce.... It is jungle Raj, her family has been devastated while the perpetrators are roaming free and happy.... Mere slogan shouting in private won’t help, we should hold protests, demonstrations to make justice time-bound, make system transparent—it was a law student. Shame on Shyam who turned hostile to the memory of his love and said under oath that he had nothing to do with Sarla!’

Many had seen the boy and the girl going around as a couple but nobody came forward as a witness to the alleged love affair between them. For months they had been dilly dallying with the mute requests, to no effect, made by an almost inconsequential prosecution staff in the case. The girl’s father was no more in a position to take the legal battle at the next level.

****

Following our trail of justice or rather injustice, we now come to the seventies. Aspirations soar and spiral upwards. Following this law, the hereditary zamindar drifting along the developing India had become an absentee landlord and based himself as an influential businessman. Still looking upwards, he sent his daughter—the youngest of his brood and the peach of his heart—to a college in Bombay, the city of dreams and development.

She was really beautiful, its whole feeling seeping into the very pores of her skin. She carried an aloof, dismissive air.  Her flirting coquetry raised many an aspiring eyes towards her. Over all, she didn’t appear to care a rap even about the most handsome, powerful and influential face of any man around. She thus became a coveted trophy on the campus and who’ll win her heart became a matter of gross, illogical, infatuated war among the lovers.

One of her suitors was the scion of a prominent national level industrialist family. Arrowed and slain by the criminal negligence shown by her to his humiliated, arrogant, slithering advance, he would shriek into the ears of his friends:

‘She is a fool. Puts on so much of air...even our servant’s status would match her father’s!’

As can be naturally estimated, theirs was a politically linked family. His father had twice been an MLA. Being brought up in this evil opulence of money and politics, he had all the devil’s pampering to his young and budding ego. His ever-agitated soul thus went to the lowest gloom of unrequited love. After his decent, balanced advancements bearing no fruit, he like an ever-obliging lover went on his knees to plead his love; wrote his heart’s demands on a paper with his real blood. And like the intensity of fire mysteriously, stealthily burning for the decimation of the moth around the flame, her secret enjoyment in tormenting him by her feigned manners of ignorance about him, she brought this pampered spoilt brat to the brink of his inflamed passion’s blind fury.

Reaching the next stage of frustration, he began intimidating her. The more he tried to stalk her, the more aloof, withdrawn, dismissive and cold she became to his treacherous advances. The poor girl was fully convinced that he was merely putting up a showy drama—for how could someone harm somebody whom he really loved—so like a fire prolonging its burning in order to tickle and flirt with the moth’s wings, she got out of fuel, rather say, she burnt herself out.

Lost in the hopeless pit of his unrequited love, he stabbed her right in front of the hundreds of horrified eyes on the campus lawn. For each of his innocent pinch to his heart, he gave her cold-blooded murderous stabbings. Her father was crushed beyond imagination at the sight of his decimated rose. Like all who have money and muscles, his first instinct was to romp home to the portals of justice by taking the short-cut of doing it himself using the resources at his own end. However, whether we do it or not is determined by our relative strength (money and muscle wise) vis-à-vis the opponent. Hence after the initial fretting and fuming, this fact dawned upon him and the aggrieved father ran to the institutional law to seek justice for his slain girl.

Many a time, the law had been at his side because by the grace of God his interests had pitted him against the weaker ones. Now but he was up against a bigger force. As a true conniver himself regarding where and how the case can be deliberately weakened, he took utmost care to avoid such a pitfall. However, the proximity among the top cops and the boy’s prominent family ensured almost a tardy and wilfully neglected investigation right from the beginning. (It will remain so as long as the ramparts of endless paperwork lie between the cold-blooded murderer and the victim.)

The evidence was criminally mucked up by the investigating officer. His acts of omission and commission ensured that the weapon of murder was never found. The police officials bombarded the trial court with wrong information; then shrewdly deflecting the case of justice, they made the prosecution’s case so weak that within six months the murderer came out on bail. Once out of the jail, he regained all his former luxuries in full style. During the ensuing long and protracted dates during the coming months and years (fetched by the deceased’s father using his level of clout and money) the ugly nexus between police and prosecution made the defender’s case so weighty that the fabric of justice was once again torn.

The system of justice has been lampooned. A cold-blooded murder in broad daylight is not supposed to take place unless corroborated by some witnessing eyes. Let’s hope under the hawk’s eye things have changed these days. The mechanical eye does not need to get scared of a bullet as a witness. The human eye pretended not to see so many wrongs in the past; to save troubles; to save its own poor skin. It makes the whole society literally a conniver in hiding the real witnesses in its safe crowd watching from a safe distance.

The power and stature of the boy’s family was such that it intimidated the whole college. The students’ petrified families admonished them to desist from any imprudence. All said they were not around the scene of the crime when it happened and the law (so easy to fool it) was blind-forced to suppose that the lawn must have been empty that day; somebody was in the classroom; somebody in the canteen; in laboratories; everywhere except the lawn.

It dragged hopelessly for five years. The additional sessions judge, fully aware of the inevitability of the impotency of justice under his hammer, made it a means of getting advancement in his career. So without perpetuating the agony and farce of it any more, he gave the verdict of not guilty in return for posting as a High Court Judge.

The girl’s father approached the High Court. However, by now the crime was too far both in time and space. In the misty distance, the prosecution itself had left so many unexplored and untouched issues and left it in such a terribly messed up farcical way that it was almost impossible to put together the pieces of circumstantial evidence. The defense case appeared almost super-strong in the absence of any deposition by even a single eyewitness.

From the FIR to the post-mortem report, everything had been messed up in such a manner that though the court accepted the girl died but as to the fact of who committed the murder it stayed beyond the possibility to know and prove as per the known facts in the files. The girl’s father knew that all he could do—at a great cost to himself—was just to drag the case on and on. Disgusted and almost crippled old, he left it to die after his natural death on the sick bed of judiciary...to be lost in the misty corridors of law full of webby provisions, clauses, sub-clauses, conditions, statutes that have the stealth and expertise to acquit a cold-blooded murderer.

Meanwhile, the more influential family of the murderer, after trapping the system to commit deliberate lapses through fabrication and conspiracy, thrived as per their power and status allowed them. The fact of the girl’s death existing only on papers now. It has to be noted that even the blood-stained clothes had disappeared of late.

How can we blame judiciary only, after all it is a game of disproving (majorly) the crime? The major thrust of the application of judicial mind is towards whitewashing the truth, for both true and false parties have equal means to exploit and the superior (mostly the wrong-doer) avails himself of the better application of laws. All it boils down to is the superior legal skills irrespective of the moral debate of right and wrong.

****

Now we move onto the next stage of crime at the next hierarchy. In the ebullient eighties, when the revengeful politicians were inciting mobs to communal murder, loot and arson in Delhi to increase their quotient of loyalty in the darbar of the first political family in the country, one high profile crime happened in the pink city of Jaipur.

Efficiently guided by a don-turned-politician, the father of the absolved murderer of the girl managed to get the grand patriarch of the family elected as a member of parliament. In the mercurial political waters following the killing of the iron lady, a get-together of politicians, industrialists and bureaucrats (who all wanted to discuss aftermaths and strategy for their own better future) was held at Jaipur. The convener was an all-powerful scion of Rajasthan royalty.

The royalty no longer existed in its direct form but thousands of years of history brimming with all powerful monarchy, magnificent palaces, marching armies of staff and servants, unchecked opulence and the consequent unrestrained enjoyment of the same, display, exploitation, rewards and punishment were just less than four decades old. Even though the iron lady had abolished the privy purses, the erstwhile ruling families still wielded considerable power. By the way, they hated her for this and hated PM Nehru even more for usurping the throne of the whole of India, depriving them of their principalities and provinces, putting India as a mass-stricken poverty plagued democracy under elected sovereigns.

Perks, wealth, stature and respect still existed in the desert state for the former rulers to be called princes and kings both in letter and spirit. These foreign educated and alumni of Mayo College Ajmer were in towering businesses, senior-most offices in bureaucracy and foreign services thanks to their regal past. So there were ambassadors, commissioners, judges, secretaries and ministers among the different scions of former royal families.

In the agitated and excited aftermaths of the killing of the PM, with scared, flirtatious excitement this important mass of the choicest section of society gathered in the magnificent audience hall of the glittering palace (now turned into a heritage hotel by the prince) to condole the death and still more importantly to know (without baring the truest thoughts going in their minds) what others thought and how better options could be chosen for future in order to safeguard their self-interests.

Except the humble waiters, who moved servilely and mechanically, without any outer show of interest in the luxurious feast and talk, not a single less important persona was present in the august gathering. The gathering talked as a whole, then in still smaller groups drifted as per carefully chosen interests, then in still smaller ones as they came to the specifics. They were trying to measure up the common frequency. Then in the wee hours, with flushed drunk faces they entered still more seriously into the more private recesses, in two, three and fours to stand trial for their own interests and prospects.

Late next morning, the industrialist-cum-politician was found dead on the bed in his magnificent room. His eyes with a look of acute surprise popped open and blood from the left temple had trickled down to darken the velvety soft bedspread he’d lain himself upon so happily, with stars in his eyes for a better tomorrow. The unlocked room from inside and the presence of no weapon made murder self-evident.

Then started the long and mammoth approach of law for on that night of murder so many important and influential personalities were sleeping and luxuriating in the rooms of the same palace-cum-hotel. The owner prince fretted, fumed and repeatedly emphasised that it was suicide, finding it less stigmatising than a murder on his premises.

‘What has happened, has happened! Now make it a suicide case. I don’t like too much of your policing and snubbing around my palace!’ he fumed at the Joint Commissioner (Crime) a distant nephew of his.

Given their stature, the police could do it in a routine, fair manner to arrive at a convenient report. Mostly the servants were forced to depose in a way to suit the suicide theory. Very conveniently the pistol involved in the suicide had surfaced. The evidence was padded in a manner, amply testified by false witnesses, that the culpability of anybody other than the dead man himself in taking his own life was beyond question. So there were waiter witnesses who deposed before the judge how they had broken the door and described in great detail the suicide scene. The pistol was presented. The real bullet was changed for the innocent spent cartridge taken out from the said pistol and sent for ballistic and forensic examination in its nascent stage in India of eighties.

In this battle of justice, the individual was pitted against the class. So ‘class’ as a superior entity ensured that the murder passed as a suicide. The FIR had been registered on the complaint of the deceased’s friend, the don-turned-politician who might have had his suspicions early on but settled to the fact that the muck was settling down in the jar. So that was that.

****

So the game of justice goes on. All this talk of justice seems another means for the superior to manipulate his will, to cover his evil-doing. Only God seems to be doing justice through his incidental hammer through chance occurrences in which the crime doer of yesterday gets outwitted by the superior wrong-doer of today (through manipulation of police and judiciary of course) who in turn gets undone by some more superior person at the next hierarchy.

The judiciary thus comes out to be the means and mechanism of meting out justice (though by giving wrong judgements) by the divine agency. For if judiciary does not fail today, how will a wrong-doer of yesterday be punished? That’s how it goes fella!

We shouldn’t throw too many bricks at the system of law, for its fallibility ensures that justice is somehow done in the longer sense of the term. However, it is dependent upon the divine intervention—of putting a former evil-doer against a superior wrong-doer of the present.