Justice has to be just

Now there is a Facebook group called Justice for Ruchika. I got invites but am not planning to join. It’s not that I am not angered by the piffling conviction that S P S Rathore got. No woman who has traveled in a Delhi bus will feel differently.

But I am not joining the group for two reasons. One, I feel such groups are no different from meaningless candlelight vigils about which I have written earlier.
More importantly, I am just not comfortable with all that is happening now.

Slapping new charges, filing fresh FIRs (which eminent legal experts like Ram Jethmalani and K T S Tulsi have criticized) is perhaps not the best way of going about getting justice for Ruchika.

The right way to go about it would have been to pressure the CBI to appeal the verdict in a higher court and press for a longer sentence there, which is what happened in the Jessica Lal case, and making sure that the arguments are watertight.

Take the new charges of abetment to suicide. That seems to be on very weak ground. Apparently this had been dismissed by the high court and Supreme Court earlier. The CBI officer who had headed the probe has clearly said that the charge was weak even then because Ruchika had committed suicide three years after the molestation incident and left no suicide note. So on what basis are charges of abetment to suicide be framed and made to stick? Am not sure if abetment to suicide charges can be levied only by relatives saying so or whether it requires a suicide note. I would like to be educated about this.

The immediate rejoinder to that will be that the CBI official was protecting Rathore. Maybe. But that charge can stick only if the officer deliberately overlooked or destroyed strong evidence of abetment to suicide. There is nothing right now to suggest that.

There is unhappiness over the fact that Rathore has got interim anticipatory bail and I heard Anand Parkash saying on television that this shows the system is still trying to shield Rathore. Now this is clearly unfair. Giving bail to someone on a bailable offence is hardly an attempt to shield that person.

The initial outrage over the laughable six months that Rathore got has now snowballed into something uncontrollable and often ridiculous. The Indian Express had an editorial, Call off the mob, which highlights the danger of letting public outrage dictate justice. The points it makes are very valid. The topic of NDTV’s Big Fight programme is going to be “Is media trial the only way to get justice”. This is, quite simply, appalling. There can be no justification for the media arrogating to itself the role of judges.

Like I wrote in the end of my post on the media behaviour in this case on my other blog, the travesty of justice which happened should not become an excuse for vigilante justice.

More Meaningless Vigils

Oh no, not again. That was my first reaction when I saw the news clips of the candlelight vigils for Ruchika Girhotra. Like it happened in the Jessica Lal case, this too may lead to a relook at the judgement giving S P S Rathore a laughable six months imprisonment and Rs 1000 fine. And it will be all hailed as a victory for middle class activism.

But I find this whole candlelight vigil business quite farcical. Read an earlier post of mine Middle Class Angst to understand what I am trying to say. I made a similar point in another post, Nithari and Us.

I wonder how many of those who participated in the vigil in Chandigarh knew the Girhotras and stood by them in all these years? From all accounts, it was only the Parkash family who did that. The Girhotras were forced to shift houses and leave Chandigarh because of harassment by Rathore. When he sent goons to their house to pelt stones did his other neighbours come out in a group and confront them? Or did they all sit quietly behind locked doors and watch the drama from their windows? When her brother was booked in false cases and tortured, did anyone other than the Parkash family take up his cause?

It’s very easy now to participate in a candlelight vigil after Rathore has been convicted. And once everyone is sure he is not in a position to harm them any more. I would have saluted all these people if they had done something like this in all these 19 years.

This candlelight vigil doesn’t mean that more Ruchikas won’t be harassed by more Rathores any more. I am absolutely certain that among those in the vigils there will be many who will not do even an iota of what the Parkash family did for the Girhotras when faced with a similar situation. Why, they will not even stop to help if they see a girl being teased in a bus. Even if it happened to their own daughters, they will, in all probability, hush things up.

We don’t need more candlelight vigils. We need more Parkashes.