The Delhi Rape and the Great Indian Muddle Class: Hypocrisy Hundredfold

Or,

IN WHICH I AM DISGUSTED ONCE MORE

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The hypocrisy of the Great Indian Muddle Class is a thing to behold.

Each time I come across it, each time I think that surely the Muddle Class can’t exceed this next time round, it does so routinely. Each time, without fail, the Muddle Class shows itself to be even more contemptible than one might imagine.

Three years ago I’d written about a particularly gruesome gang-rape in Delhi, which had inflicted such horrific injuries on the victim that she’d died in hospital several days later. That had set off a wave of “protests” across the country – “protests” which I’d characterised as not being directed at the rape itself, but at the simple fact that the perpetrators had been working-class village migrants and the victim had been of the Muddle Class. The victim – named “Nirbhaya” by the media, though her real name, Jyoti Singh Pandey, was an open secret anyone could have discovered with a ten second Google search – was turned into a kind of celebrity. And even though the law did not permit the death sentence to be applied to rape, the demand (this was before the victim died and the charge upgraded to murder) was for the rapists to be executed anyway.

As I’d said then:

It’s an absolute certainty that if the victim of the rape had been of the labourer set, there would have been as little reaction from the Muddle Class as there is when (as happens routinely) rich kids driving SUVs get drunk and crush homeless people to death. The Muddle Class doesn’t care about anyone but itself.

Accordingly, whatever the “protests” appear to be, they are not actually against the rapes – they are protests against the Muddle Class being made to feel vulnerable. No more, no less.

Sure enough, a year and a half later when two village girls, from the bottom layer of society, were gang raped and hanged to death – and the Great Indian Muddle Class scarcely turned a hair. The same people who had demanded the death penalty for the Delhi rapists didn’t stir a finger to even put up Fakebook status messages of sympathy. As I'd pointed out at the time, it was foreigners who were more disturbed than Indians.

Now, one of the perpetrators of the rape in Delhi in December 2012 was, at the time, a juvenile – 17 years old. Under Indian law as it now stands, offenders below the age of 18 are treated as juveniles, and, of course (like elsewhere in the world) are not subject to the same standards of punishment as adults. The media alleged – there is no independent confirmation of this whatsoever and therefore no reason to believe it – he was also the “most sadistic” of them all. Whether that is true or not – and, let me repeat, there is no reason to believe it is and plenty of reason to believe it is not – he was most certainly a juvenile at the time the crime was committed, and after detention of three years, his time of release came around at last.

Before I go any further, let me explain something clearly, in case someone thinks I’m condoning rape or excusing the criminal in this or any other case: I am not, actually, one of those who think that a criminal should get off lightly only on account of his age. It’s not as though at the age of 17 years 364 days, 23 hours and 59 minutes a person is a child, and, voila, 60 seconds later some kind of switch turns on in his head and he’s suddenly an adult. And it wouldn’t make any difference if the age at which one is to be considered a “juvenile” is reduced to, say, 16 years. There’s no switch that goes click.

(Incidentally, that’s a problem I have with voting as well; how does one seriously claim that a 17 year old is too young to understand the nuances of democratic choice, but just a year later magically does? I was politically aware at 14, and I know people in their sixties with the political knowledge of a chunk of rock.)

But the law is the law, and, besides, is a very well known law. It’s never been the case that people didn’t know that the age of being a juvenile is 18 or that juveniles are treated differently. And there’s never been any secret about the fact that once the three years of detention were up, the juvenile in this case would be released, or, to be more exact, would be placed in a programme with an NGO where his final status would be determined. No secret at all.

This is why what happened when the release date came around can only be described as a circus performance. The first was the decision by Jyoti Singh Pandey’s parents to declare her name to the world, saying that they had nothing to be ashamed of. This is of course true. They had nothing at all to be ashamed of. It wasn’t a stain on the girl’s morals that she was accosted on a bus, raped, brutalised, and ultimately murdered. But a simple question then arises: what exactly was holding the parents back from declaring the girl’s name to the world for the last three years, when she was being referred to in the media by such monikers as “Damini” or, much more frequently, “Nirbhaya”? As I said, her real name was no secret; it was known to the world from the start, and only those who actively didn’t want to know it could have avoided the knowledge. So why hold off for so long?

Perhaps because they wanted to catch the attention of the media and were waiting for the right time to come around?

That was just the start of the circus. As the release date grew closer, the “protestors” suddenly found their voice, brushed the dust off their placards, and demanded that the release be cancelled. On what legal basis this might happen, of course, they could not point out. All these years, they’d made no attempt to get the law changed to either lower the age of juvenility to 16, as they said they wanted, or to make certain crimes not applicable to the law. Even if they had done so, they could not have, as the Communist parliamentarian Brinda Karat pointed out, make it retrospective. You can’t punish a person for a crime he committed under a law which did not exist when said crime was committed. But of course the “protestors” ignored this.

In fact, what they really wanted is simple. They didn’t want a change in the law; that might have created problems for their own rich kids, who so frequently get roaring drunk at late night parties and run over, say, poor homeless people sleeping on the pavements. When that happens, or, similarly, when these kids rape poor women, then these same Muddle Class specimens are their first line of defence: they were “kids” who “didn’t know what they were doing” and the like. In this case, they certainly wanted no change in the law, which anyway wouldn’t have served their purpose; what they wanted in this instance was an exception to the law.

Can one say “hypocrisy”?

Three full days after the High Court passed down its verdict clearing the release of the juvenile (his name may or may not be Mohammad Afroz; I’ve not been able to confirm it), the “protestors” moved the Supreme Court, at midnight, to stop the release. There is, can be, absolutely no justification for this last moment, midnight appeal but theatricality. As even a Congress Party politician said, and this is one of the few instances when I find myself agreeing with a Congress politician on anything, it’s just “doing politics”. The Supreme Court, to its credit, did not stop the release, and the juvenile is no longer in custody now. It would have been a ludicrous pandering to the Muddle Class if an exception had been made to the law to suit its demands.

Even more ridiculously, a law is now supposed to be passed to bring down the age of juvenility to 16, but only for “heinous crimes”. What decides when a crime is “heinous”, I can’t tell you. From my own examination of death penalties in India, which are supposed to be restricted to the “rarest of the rare” cases, the only thing I could conclude is that one’s chances of being sentenced to death are dependent on one’s being (a) poor or (b) lower caste or Muslim. If one happens to be both poor and lower caste/Muslim, it’s just about a certainty, while the mega rich might not even be jailed for the same kind of offence.

Can one doubt that this will also be exactly what happens with the new law, assuming it is passed and the courts allow it to stand?

Let me make a prediction: Jyoti Singh Pandey’s parents are going to use her corpse as a stepping stone into politics. I won’t say that they have made any plans to do so yet, or that the idea has even entered their heads. But the idea has certainly entered someone’s head. Somebody is arranging and directing this circus, these so-called “protests”, with the full knowledge that they will be useless in their stated “aim” – to stop Afroz, or whatever his name is, from being released. Nothing of this kind happens by chance, and someone is determined to use it for gain. And the only kind of gain I can think of is political.

All we have to do is wait and see which political party turns this into a crusade, and snaps up the Pandeys as members. Then we’ll know. I'll bet you one of them will.

Readers might think I’m being too cynical. To which my response would be:

If you think I’m cynical, you don’t have much of a nodding acquaintance with reality, do you?

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[Note: I am leaving this article without any photographic illustration. I can't seem to find any which adequately conveys my disgust towards the Great Indian Muddle Class, which, of course, is my primary target here.]

Update India: The Noose and the Drone

On the 13^th of December, 2001, at around half past eleven in the morning, a squad of five Fidayeen terrorists attacked the Indian Parliament building in New Delhi. Travelling in a white Ambassador car which was furnished with fake security stickers, it somehow managed to make its way through all the concentric layers of policemen and associated guards, until it reached the Parliament building itself. The five terrorists then – in view of TV cameras – opened fire, killing seven and injuring eighteen people before they were shot dead by the security men present. None of the politicians were killed or injured.

The incident sparked off a completely artificial war scare with Pakistan, in which thousands of Indian soldiers were sent to sit at the border and – as a lot of them did – get blown up by their own landmines. Everyone knew it was an artificial war scare because the politicians and industrialists made no attempt to send their money and families abroad, and because any war with Pakistan would mean the annihilation of India’s industrial base, which is concentrated in the west of the country. Besides, an all out attack against a nuclear-armed enemy would be the action of a suicidal moron, and whatever the Hindunazi government then in power was, it was not moronic.

In the aftermath of that attack, some people were arrested. Now, as a general rule, in the aftermath of every terror attack in India in which Muslim terrorists are either involved or suspected to be involved, the security forces magically find incredibly detailed clues (often including mobile phones complete with numbers called, left at the scene) which enable them to speedily round up a whole mess of “conspirators” – not one of whom would be under suspicion otherwise.

So it happened in this case, where these terrorists, despite the planning that got them into shooting distance of Parliament,

... left behind a thick trail of evidence—weapons, mobile phones, phone numbers, ID cards, photographs, packets of dry fruit, and even a love letter.[source]

You know, just what terrorists carry along with them to prove who they are and who their contacts are.

Among the people arrested in this case, then, were a Kashmiri fruit seller, one Afzal Guru, and a teacher in a Delhi college, one SAR Geelani. Both were sentenced to death by a special “anti-terrorism” court – one operating under a lovely, and since repealed, Indian law called POTA under which the burden of proof of innocence was on the accused (who was in custody and hence of course unable to furnish proof) and a confession to police (invariably under torture) was evidence.

But, sentenced to death or not, the case against the accused was full of holes – so full, indeed, that the Supreme Court of India finally acquitted SAR Geelani, to the fury of the Great Indian Muddle Class and the police. Geelani was then most mysteriously shot and badly injured outside his lawyer’s home one evening, but fortunately survived. Not so lucky was Afzal Guru.

SAR Geelani

A couple of months ago, I’d written about the hanging of the (alleged) lone surviving terrorist of the Bombay attacks of 2008, Ajmal Kasab. Now, there wasn’t any real doubt about Kasab’s guilt – he was even photographed in the act. But there was absolutely nothing – nothing at all – that was certain about the guilt of Afzal Guru.

That didn’t stop the Zee TV network from making a film, during the trial, and showing it on national TV, in which SAR Geelani and Guru were both portrayed as a hundred percent guilty. If Zee apologised after the acquittal of Geelani, I never heard about it. (I meant that sarcastically; of course they didn’t.)

Guru, in the "Islamic terrorist" picture in which the media always depicts him. At his arrest he had no beard and a clipped moustache.

Since this post isn’t, per se, about the trial of Guru, I am not going to go into details about the evidence (or, more accurately, lack thereof).  More information on the travesty that was Guru’s trial is here. I’ll just point out this: the Supreme Court of India, in its judgement, admitted that there was no proof that Afzal Guru was a member of any terrorist group and the “evidence” against him was only circumstantial. But, even so, it said it was sentencing him to death to “satisfy the collective conscience of society”. Meaning, someone, anyone, had to pay for the crime, so why not this ready-to-hand scapegoat of a Muslim Kashmiri?

The years went by, with Guru on death row, and with his mercy petition pending before the President of India. The Hindunazi government of the time fell, and another, equally right wing, but allegedly secular Congress Party government took over. Presidents took over and left office, but none of them made a decision on the Guru execution. (It must be understood that the President’s position in India is absolutely that of a rubber stamp; he is a complete figurehead who can’t reject any order advice sent to him by the government. He can only send it back – once – for “reconsideration”. However, he has a considerable moral authority, and anything sent back by the President is just about dead in the water.) Until this last President, Pranab Mukherjee, long a functionary of the ruling Congress Party, took over and instantly began signing death warrants.

There is, of course, a reason why Pranab Mukherjee should be sign executions at this time. Nothing in India happens without a political reason. The Hindunazis have many times over accused the Congress Party of being “soft on terrorism”, and jeered at them for not hanging Guru. Now, those of you who have been reading me for some time know that this is, positively, the worst government ever to contaminate the halls of power in this nation, so much so that (and I’m embarrassed to say this) even their murderous and corrupt Hindunazi predecessors look like angels of shining light compared to them. And now, election season is almost upon us; a plethora of state elections (including in this state) due this month, and national elections next year, which the Congress has not a hope of winning unless the Hindunazis sabotage themselves.

So, Afzal Guru was hanged on the ninth of February, in complete secrecy, the execution announced with fanfare after the fact. Curfew was also clamped down in Kashmir, just driving in the point that the government doesn’t trust the Kashmiris not to revolt. (Nice way to turn the man into a martyr.)

Incidentally, the policeman who was responsible for arresting and, arguably, framing Guru, was killed by a property dealer whom he was extorting for money. The man was an “encounter specialist” – a death squaddie, in other words, who commits extrajudicial murder and gets away with it. (There was a phase during the 2000s when “encounter specialists” were legion in Bombay and Delhi, and noted for their extreme levels of unaccounted wealth. Lately, the species has fallen out of fashion.) In other words, a paragon of honesty he wasn't.

To get back to the story: the net is already full of the Great Indian Muddle Class (who also profess to hate politicians and who claim that the extinction of the political class would gladden their hearts) cheering the hanging of Guru. Of course, if Guru were actually guilty, then they should have been mourning his death – as one person who actually took some action to rid them of the politicians they claim to despise so much. But the fact is that Guru was a Muslim, and if there is one thing that unites the Great Indian Muddle Class, it is their reflexive Islamomisia*.

After all, this same Great Indian Muddle Class makes no effort to demand the execution of (Hindu) Tamil terrorists proven to be complicit in the murder of the former Prime Minister of India, Rajiv Gandhi, in 1991, and they have repeatedly voted for the chief minister of the state of Gujarat, a Hindunazi named Narendra Modi who unleashed a pogrom in 2002 in which more than two thousand Muslims were killed and many more made homeless and destitute. Nor do the courts make any effort to sentence to death Hindu terrorists who are at least as much of a threat to the country as the Muslim terrorists are.

The conclusion is inescapable – the execution of Guru, just like his conviction, was entirely a political act, and its timing gauged for political effect. And if the Great Indian Muddle Class falls into the trap (as it has) of supporting political executions, it should beware. Once a policy becomes institutionalised, it’s only a matter of time before it’s turned on its original backers. How will the Muddle Class react if a future government find it expedient to hang one of its pet Hindunazi icons? Not too well, I think.

Talking about extrajudicial murder, India’s first combat drone is scheduled to fly for the first time very soon. It’s claimed to be roughly the equivalent of the Predator. And, knowing the Indian government’s extreme subservience to the American, if the US can justify droning its own people  purely on suspicion, India can, too.

The only silver lining in this is the fact of the incredible and well-known incompetence of India’s defence industry, which can’t even produce a successful basic infantry rifle, let alone something as complex as a combat drone. One can reliably depend on the Rustom (that’s what it’s called) still being “test flown” twenty years from now, while Indian officials keep talking about how it’s going to be the best in the world when it gets into service.

Meanwhile, please note that, basically, the choice for the nation is between the ultra-right Hindunazis and the pro-Hindu “secular” ultra-right. Whoever wins, we’re all going to lose.

Here’s looking down the drain.

*         I will henceforth use this term in preference to Islamophobia. These people don’t fear Islam, they hate it. There's a difference. (misos=hatred)

Update (11 February): 

Information obtained after this article was written indicates:

1. Afzal Guru himself was informed of his imminent execution only at bedtime on the night before the hanging (he was hanged at 8 am). I can only speculate on the reason, but the only thing I can think of is that it was intended to stop him from making any last minute legal appeals for stay of execution. The current Supreme Court - headed by a Muslim to boot - is a tad more liberal than the one which confirmed Guru's execution.

2. Not only was Kashmir put under curfew, but large numbers of Kashmiris in Delhi were arrested as a "preventive" including SAR Geelani, who was taken to an unknown place. As of now I am not aware if he has been released. 

3. I'm mildly surprised by the Indian media. By and large, chest-thumping is absent and some amount of soul-searching is going on. Of course they aren't criticising the execution - they
are in favour of that - but of the possibility that the hanging will wipe out the so-called "goodwill" Indians pretend Kashmiris feel for them. Well, boys - you know what, that bus left town long ago.

Copyright B Purkayastha 2013

This Case Exemplifies Why I'm Against the Death Penalty

Three men sit on death row in an Indian jail, convicted of conspiring to kill an Indian politician over twenty years ago. That politician was Rajiv Gandhi, the country’s former prime minister, and then owner of the Congress Party. He was blown to pieces in May 1991 by a female suicide bomber belonging to the Sri Lankan Tamil terrorist group, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, at Sriperumbudur in South India while canvassing for an election he was expected to win.

The suicide bomber waiting, in orange and green

There wasn’t really ever a doubt about who was responsible; the LTTE had even laid on a photographer to take a video of the assassination, and he was accidentally killed by the explosion (and his cameras recovered, with photographic evidence). Some days later, the rest of the terrorist cell which had actually carried out the assassination was tracked down, and committed suicide when surrounded in a house. And the other members of the support network were arrested, 26 of them, and all condemned to death. As many as 22 of them had their sentences subsequently commuted to life imprisonment, one was pardoned because she was a woman and pregnant, and the other three had their final mercy petitions turned down by the president of the country, and their hanging (yes, India still hangs people to death – more about that in a moment) set for the 9^th of September.

Pretty straightforward?

Only if you ignore the background.

Rajiv Gandhi came to power on the death of his mother, Indira Gandhi, who was killed by her own Sikh security guards, one of whom was subsequently killed, and the other (Satwant Singh) hanged along with his uncle Kehar (the latter, almost certainly a miscarriage of justice). Indira Gandhi was killed after she ordered the army to attack the most important shrine of the Sikh religion, the Golden Temple in Amritsar, Punjab, in order to flush out separatist Sikh terrorists who had turned it into a military base. Those Sikh terrorists had turned it into a military base because that self-same Indira Gandhi had earlier encouraged their leader, a fundamentalist Sikh preacher called Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, to start a violent separatist movement in order to destabilise the government of Punjab, which at that time was under the Akali Dal party, which was opposed to Gandhi’s Congress.

For days after the assassination, armed gangs led openly by Congress functionaries roamed through the streets of North Indian cities, murdering thousands of Sikhs and looting their businesses. Rajiv Gandhi, who took over as Indian Prime Minister on the evening of the murder, had only this to say: “When a big tree falls, the ground shakes.”

This same Rajiv Gandhi later sent Indian troops to Sri Lanka on a “peace-keeping mission”, in which they attacked the Tamil groups fighting the fascist Sri Lankan government of the time, acted as the sword arm of that same Sri Lankan government, and suffered such appalling casualties that by the time they had withdrawn in defeat three years later, the government had long since stopped divulging the casualty toll.

And that attack was the reason Rajiv Gandhi was blown apart by a Tamil girl suicide bomber on 21^st May 1991, and why Murugan, Santhan and Perarivalan are now on death row.

You understand, of course, to what I refer? Actions have consequences, and consequences have consequences. And while one condemns the criminal, one should remember that the victim might have had plenty of crimes to answer for, as well.

According to Indian law, the death penalty is reserved for the “rarest of the rare” cases. Of course, it’s up to the courts to decide which cases are the “rarest of the rare”, and few death sentences survive the appeals process, which goes through – at the least – two further courts and then the President for clemency.

Therefore, it’s kind of interesting to see which cases actually seem to qualify as the “rarest of the rare” to enough judges to merit the hangman's noose.

These three aren’t the only people on death row in India; there are many others. A lot of these have appeals pending, and others have mercy petitions pending as well. However, a look at them will show quite clearly that they fall into two distinct groups:

1.     People from poor backgrounds, some of whom may be mentally ill, who can’t pay for proper legal representation, and may not even be guilty of the crime they’ve been condemned for. One recent case was a man from a village in Assam, who decapitated another man and promptly turned himself in to the police. A crime in the heat of the moment wouldn’t normally attract even life behind bars, don’t you think? This man got death.

2.     People whose actions have a political dimension. If you’ve killed a politician, or if you’ve targeted a politician, or if the political class’ prestige has taken a hit due to your actions, you’re toast. You don’t even have to be guilty; as the Supreme Court of India said while condemning a man named Afzal Guru to death for plotting a suicide attack on the Indian parliament, the “collective conscience” of society demanded someone had to pay for the crime.

Meanwhile, if you’re rich or middle class, you can get away with pretty much anything, as long as your victims aren’t politicians or among the rich or famous. If you kill the poor, you’re home free. Certainly, you won’t hang, whatever happens to you. You can literally run over people with your swank car, and then hide the evidence, and you’ll get away with it. You can murder your girlfriend, chop her body into pieces, and cook her in the oven of a restaurant you own – and you won’t get a death sentence.

All that’s not the rarest of the rare, you bet.

The last man executed in India was a man named Dhananjoy Chatterjee, who was hanged in 2004 for the rape-murder of a girl named Hetal Parekh. Chatterjee was a poor man who worked as a security guard; Parekh was the daughter of upper-middle class parents who insisted on his hanging.

So? He was a brutal rapist-murderer, wasn’t he?

Well, I’m not saying Chatterjee was innocent. I am, however, pointing out that he was poor, unable to afford good legal representation, that the media unanimously supported the Parekh family (who were “people like us”) and piled on pressure for his execution – and that the execution neither brought Hetal Parekh back from the dead nor prevented any similar crimes. In fact, the hypocrisy of the entire thing was exposed within weeks when another man was sentenced to life for a crime virtually identical to Chatterjee’s – the only difference was that he was from an affluent background. If Chatterjee had been rich, or if he’d killed some labourer’s daughter, nothing like execution would have happened to him.

Remember also the fact that India still uses hanging as a method of execution. Now, hanging isn’t like a firing squad or like a gas chamber – it’s a fairly skilled job. If you give too little slack in the rope, your victim will strangle (actually, he usually does anyway, but he isn’t supposed to) slowly. If you leave too much rope, you might tear the poor character’s head off (I believe this happened to one of Saddam Hussein’s aides). Hanging’s not for amateurs.

Now, this is India, the land of castes, where each and every occupation has its own caste guilds. Hangmen are rather thin on the ground, and Dhanajoy Chatterjee’s executioner, Nata Mullick, was at the time an 84-year-old relic of the British era, when people got the noose if they looked at the white masters crossly. Mullick became a media celebrity, demonstrated on TV how he would tie the noose to hang Chatterjee, lamented that there were so few executions these days, and tried to wangle jobs for his family members in return for hanging Chatterjee. 

All in all, it was a fairly pathetic performance, but the point is, hangmen are in such short supply that executions can become literally impossible due to a shortage of them – or be messed up totally and completely. If there has to be executions, I’d prefer to see something more humane, like a bullet to the back of the skull or something. But there are people who would call it too easy.

But to get back to the point – Rajiv Gandhi’s killer-helpers. They’ve been behind bars for twenty years, the crime itself is long in the past, and the very organisation which ordered his killing has been destroyed, its leader killed. Gandhi’s party, now in power, is reviled and hated by most Indians, and is certainly in charge of the most evil, incompetent, and corrupt government this nation has ever had, so bad that the previous Hindunazi government now evokes fond memories. If you ask the average Indian, they couldn’t give a flying eff whether Gandhi’s killers meet the noose after all these years or spend the rest of their lives in jail, especially as 22 of their alleged fellow conspirators have got that same sentence – and the heavens did not fall.

But, this being a political crime, politics have been thrown into the mix. So, the politicians of the state of Tamil Nadu have unanimously demanded that the three convicted men (all Tamils) be granted clemency, and their hanging has been postponed eight weeks while the politicians wrangle. Quite logically, the government of Kashmir has asked why it can’t similarly demand a reprieve for Afzal Guru, who happens to be Kashmiri. Of course, Guru is a Muslim, which means the Hindunazis are already up in arms against any such proposal.

I predict that the current owner of the Congress Party, Rajiv Gandhi’s widow Sonia, will try and show a “liberal” face by joining in asking for the sentences for the three to be commuted; her party’s credibility is in the crapper, and she needs every single bit of cred she can get. Whatever happens to them, the final arbiter will be politics – not justice.

These, then, are the reasons I’m against the death penalty, as exemplified by this case – quite apart from the fact that the innocent can be killed, and nobody can give them their lives back:

1.     It selectively targets the poor;

2.     It puts a premium on the status of the victim as to what punishment is given;

3.     It leaves it entirely up to the judges to decide which case attracts the death penalty and which doesn’t;

4.     It’s carried out so many years later that all concept of “justice” can be thrown in the dustbin;

5.     It uses a cruel and unusual method, very prone to going wrong;

6.     It has no deterrent effect (just as hanging Indira Gandhi’s killers didn’t stop Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination);

7.     It ends up as a political football to be kicked around by different parties; and

8.  It leaves  the  victims' own crimes unacknowledged, let alone unpunished.

As for Justice...well, they hanged her already, didn’t they?

Further Reading:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Rajiv_Gandhi
 

http://www.indiablooms.com/NewsDetailsPage/newsDetails010911k.php

http://ibnlive.in.com/news/mercy-plea-of-rajiv-gandhis-killers-rejected/174922-3.html

http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-08-29/india/29940997_1_mercy-petition-mercy-plea-clemency-plea

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhananjoy_Chatterjee

Romeo Must Die: The Nanavati Case.

As a lot of us know, a jury let off a woman in the US, one Casey Anthony, who was charged with murdering her daughter and whom a lot of people – including media bottom-feeders – seem to have tried, convicted, and executed in absentia, and whom the acquittal sent into conniptions.

Now, this article isn’t about Ms Anthony; I don’t know or care about the case enough to make any statement about it except to say that anyone victimised by a media trial has my full and entire sympathies, whether he or she is guilty or not. This article is about juries, or, more specifically, why India abandoned juries in 1959, and why I agree wholeheartedly with that decision.

There was a man named Kawas Manekshaw Nanavati. 

In 1959 he was 34 years old, a Commander in the Indian Navy, a former military attaché to Britain, and had friends in high places, including the family of then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. He also had an English wife, one Sylvia (then 28) and two sons and a daughter with her. Sylvia and the children lived in Bombay, while Nanavati himself was usually away (he was posted on the cruiser Mysore at this time).

Being lonely as well as lovely, Sylvia fell in love with one Prem Ahuja, a businessman and old friend (they had known each other for fifteen years) of Nanavati. Sylvia seemed to have believed that Ahuja would marry her, but by April 1959 that belief was wearing thin.

On the 27^th of April, Nanavati returned home from the ship in the late morning to find his wife in a sombre mood. On questioning her, she confessed her affair and said she no longer believed Ahuja would marry her. Nanavati then had lunch with her, and in a bizarre turn of events, took her and their kids to a movie theatre. Sylvia later said she was afraid her husband might kill himself but went to the movie because she didn’t want to distress the children. Even fifty years after the fact, that sounds kind of thin to me, but then there are all kinds of people.

So Nanavati dropped them there to watch the afternoon show of Tom Thumb, went back to the cruiser, checked out a revolver and six cartridges from the armoury, and drove to Ahuja’s house after finding he wasn’t at his office. Ahuja was bathing and came out of the bathroom to talk to Nanavati, wearing only a towel. Nanavati apparently asked him whether he would be willing to marry Sylvia and take care of the children if he (Nanavati) divorced her. To that, Ahuja allegedly replied “Should I marry every woman I sleep with?”

What happened after that is disputed, but at the end of it, Ahuja lay dead with three bullets in him. Nanavati, pausing only to inform the security guard at the gate of Ahuja’s apartment complex that he’d killed Ahuja for having “connections” with his wife, went and confessed to the naval Provost Marshal, and then gave himself up to the police. So far so good.

Then the complications started.

Nanavati was a Parsi (a Zoroastrian of Iranian origin; the community was at that time highly influential in Indian business, law and media, much more so than today). Ahuja, however, was a member of the Sindhi business community. Besides, Ahuja was known for his playboy lifestyle, while Nanavati was a firmly middle-class naval officer. The fact that his wife was an Englishwoman was irrelevant; the fact was that she was his wife, and anything that he did to her lover was justified in the name of middle-class honour.  Or so the Indian public, and the Parsi community, insisted.

Long before Nanavati went on trial, the whole thing had become a public circus, with vendors selling “Nanavati pistols” and “Ahuja towels” on the streets of Bombay. The Parsi-owned newspaper, Blitz, openly campaigned for Nanavati’s acquittal for his defence of “middle-class values” and “honour”. Even the Indian Navy establishment threw its support behind Nanavati, as did sundry Parsis.

The trial itself showed the polarisation of the affair along ethno-religious lines, with the prosecution being headed by a Sindhi lawyer (Ram Jethmalani, who is active to this day) while Nanavati’s defence was in the hands of a fellow Parsi. The question wasn’t whether Nanavati killed Ahuja; everyone involved took that as a fact. The question was whether he was guilty of murder or whether he was guilty of “culpable homicide not amounting to murder”. The difference lay in whether the killing was done by Nanavati in the heat of the moment, after being provoked by Ahuja, or whether he went about it in a premeditated fashion. The state chose to charge him with murder, which carries a life term or the death penalty, instead of culpable homicide, which carries a maximum sentence of ten years.

The Parsi community went ballistic, holding meetings and marches demanding the lesser charge be brought, and upholding the naval officer as a defender of family values. The Sindhi community rallied behind Ahuja’s sister Mamie, and demanded that Nanavati pay the full penalty for his crime. The media (then radio and newspapers) were full of the case, and it was in these circumstances that the trial began before a nine-man jury. The prosecution charged Nanavati with murder, ignoring the lesser charge.

Nanavati’s defence was that he was innocent; Ahuja had gone for the gun and in the tussle he’d been shot accidentally. The forensic evidence (including the fact that Ahuja’s towel was still round his waist, undisturbed, despite the “tussle”) and witness statements scuppered that line of argument. But Ahuja was the “wife-stealing playboy”, and Nanavati was the heroic defender of family values and a naval officer to boot.

The verdict came in: by eight jury votes to one, Nanavati was acquitted of murder.

The judge, to his credit, refused to accept the verdict, called it “perverse”, and referred the case to the High Court, where Nanavati was retried before a judicial bench (more than one judge) whose members convicted him of murder and sentenced him to life imprisonment. He appealed to the Supreme Court, which confirmed his conviction and sentence, though due to political and social pressure, he was pardoned and released after only three years. Sylvie, who had stood by him all this time, emigrated with him and his children to Canada (I assume Canadian emigration laws at the time were lax enough to allow murderers in). That’s the story of Nanavati. [I'll just mention one more thing about him: Salman Rushdie mentioned the case in a highly fictionalised form in Midnight's Children as "Commander Sabarmati's Baton".]

But that was India’s last jury trial. Juries were abolished after that, for fairly obvious reasons when one thinks of the hurdles of juries in a country like India, which is more a collection of nationalities instead of a nation.

If one were to put together a jury today, in this country, for instance, let’s see what one would have to do:

In our hypothetical case, let’s say a Hindu of a low caste is accused of murdering a Muslim.

First, the jury would have to be balanced religiously, because Muslim jury members might be prejudiced against him, and Hindus for him.

Then, caste considerations are important, because high-caste jury members would likely be prejudiced against a low-caste defendant.

Then, of course, the media circus (if the victim and/or the accused were socially prominent) would be intense, and let me assure you no jury in the country could be adequately insulated from the media by sequestration, let alone from political pressure or bribery.

And, of course, since none of the jury members knows anything of law, and since nobody will know what they’re talking about in the jury room, the proceedings in the court would be a farce.

This is why I’m glad this country has abandoned juries.

The legal system is bad enough already without that on top of everything else. 

Further Reading:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KM_Nanavati_v_State_of_Maharashtra

http://www.sarai.net/publications/readers/05-bare-acts/03_aarti.pdf

http://www.indiankanoon.org/doc/1596139/