The Sanju Baba Touchstone

Why are we all getting so uptight about the rush of support for dear Sanju Baba, with film stars, politicians, former lawyers and former judges pleading that he be not sent to jail? Why can’t we blinkered Middle Class Morons (as one journalist friend described us) realise that these people are showing us the way to end the problem of overcrowded jails once and for all?
There are so many extenuating circumstances in his case:
# he has already spent 18 months in jail, it’s unfair to expect him to spend the remaining 42 months behind bars
# he has already gone through so much mental trauma, he couldn’t even get bank loans and had to get court permission to travel
# he is a good human being
# his parents were patriots
# he has a wife and three children, think of them
# he only got the weapons because he was feeling insecure about his family
# oh come on, he was just a immature kid when it all happened
After all, it’s not as if courts have never been influenced by the context of a crime when handing out a sentence. In December 2009, two Supreme Court judges reduced the death sentence pronounced on a brother who killed his sister's lower caste husband, and his father and brothers in 2004 in Bombay. The sentence was reduced to life imprisonment. The judges rationale:
. . .Caste is a concept which grips a person before his birth and does not leave him even after his death. The vicious grip of the caste, community, religion, though totally unjustified, is a stark reality. The psyche of the offender in the background of a social issue like an inter-caste-community marriage, though wholly unjustified, would have to be considered on the peculiar circumstances.
So if a sentence in an honour killing (shudder, shudder) could be reduced on grounds of that shameful factor called caste, why can’t poor Sanju be let off for all of the above reasons?
And why can’t the same logic apply to a whole lot of others?
# Manu Sharma, who shot dead Jessica Lal. The poor boy only wanted a drink. So what if it was after bar closing hours? Hadn’t that model heard of Indian Standard Time? Manu comes from a larger social milieu in which boys are pampered and given whatever they asked for. If not, they throw tantrums. It was perfectly normal behaviour on his part. He was pampered more as a child because he suffers from asthma. How can someone who suffers from asthma be allowed to stay in jail? What if his condition aggravates?
In any case, Manu is from a family that had served the Congress Party selflessly. His father was a minister and his uncle’s father-in-law a former President of India. Doesn’t this all show he came from a family of patriots? And if he is in jail, who is going to manage the discotheque he owns in Chandigarh. His earnings will be affected.
# Vikas Yadav, who killed Nitish Katara, his sister’s boyfriend. Please remember the social milieu from which he came. Daughters are not supposed to choose their own husbands. They can wear jean-pant and tops, study in management institutes but have a boyfriend and then want to marry him? That is terrible. Look at the trauma the young man must have gone through. It is perfectly understandable for him to want to kill that chota-mota afsar ka beta whom his sister fancied. He wanted his sister to marry right into a thaat-baat vala family. He didn’t kill her, did he? That shows he is a good and loving brother – upholding family values. Should a person be in jail for upholding family values?
# Santosh Singh, who raped and killed Priyadarshini Matoo, whom he had been stalking. Really, he was only stalking her because he loved her. Hasn’t Sharad Yadav said there is nothing wrong with that? Priyadarshini Matoo should have reciprocated his advances and then she would have been alive. After all, didn’t that girl in that TV serial, Pratigya, do the same? She finally fell in love with her husband. What trauma Santosh Singh must have gone through when Priyadarshini, a mere ladki, rejected him. And then on top of that she complained about him to the police. His father was in the force; imagine the humiliation the family must have gone through when a girl – A GIRL – complained about their son to his father’s colleagues. Bechare ka sar ghum gaya hoga. Please understand his mental condition when he committed the crime. And he is also a family man. After his acquittal by the lower court, he got married and had a child. What about his wife and child? He also had a good lawyer’s practice.
It was only because Enlightened Elite held candle-light vigils and vented their outrage on television channels (much like we Middle Class Morons are doing today) after Manu baba was acquitted that his case was also reopened and he was sent to jail.
Hell, if Sanju Baba was a kid at 34 years, all these people were twenty-something toddlers when they committed these crimes. How could they have known what they were doing? Didn’t Lord Jesus himself say, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do?
Why should the alleged rapists of the December 16 gang rape victim be in jail? Look at the environment in which they grew up – one marked by poverty and lack of access to basic facilities, let alone proper education and employment. How are they to know that a young woman wearing jeans and a top and out with a young man at 9.30 pm is not ready to have sex with just about anyone? You expect them to know about things like consensual sex? Or a woman's right to her body? It is their mental conditioning caused by their social environment that made them commit the crime. So set them free.
Heck, there is a larger issue behind every crime. Why should taxpayer’s money be spent on jails to keep people who couldn’t help commit the crimes they did?
India’s jails are chock-a-block with over 2 lakh under-trials, a large number of whom are there for longer periods than the prescribed jail term for their offences. Get them out immediately.
Thank you Bollywood, Markandeya Katju, Digvijaya Singh, Amar Singh, Jayaprada and Shanti Bhushan. Now the money I pay in taxes won’t be wasted.

The Particular and the General

It often happens that a particular incident turns the much-needed spotlight on a larger issue that has been swept under the carpet for long. The brutal gang rape in Delhi on the night of December 16, whose victim is now unfortunately dead, did that to the issue of safety of women and laws relating to sexual violence.
There are the stray voices asking why the rape of a girl in Delhi should do this, and not the many rapes in other cities or in the deep, dark interiors of the country. There are also people saying where was such outrage during the Gujarat riots when worse was being done to women.
That is not a relevant question. There have been other shocking rapes in Delhi earlier – the gang rape by members of the President’s bodyguards in Buddha Jayanti Park, the rape of the medical student in the afternoon in a Mughal monument on the busy Bahadurshah Zafar Marg, the abduction from Dhaula Kuan and gangrape of a call centre employee – but they have not evoked the reaction that this one has. The `why now’ does not matter. What does matter is that the issue has been highlighted as never before and the focus on it should remain.
But when the particular and the general start getting mixed up, there’s a problem. There is serious danger of that happening in this case.
Let’s take the particular in this case. A girl was brutally assaulted and raped in a moving bus on the night of December 16. Her male friend was also beaten up badly. They were stripped of their clothes and dumped on the road.
The crowds thronging Vijay Chowk and India Gate started with calls for justice for the young girl and steps to ensure safety of women in Delhi in future. All the rapists were arrested in less than a week (four of them within twenty-four hours). The case was given to a fast track court, which is to hold hearings on a daily basis. Now after the girl’s death, they will also face the charge of murder.
The government also announced some steps to ensure safety of women in Delhi – more policing, more buses at night, removing dark films and curtains from windows of buses and making it compulsory for them to keep lights on inside at night. Three police personnel who had been on duty that night were suspended. A man the rapists had robbed earlier that evening had approached them and they had brushed him off. If they had acted, that young girl would not have been battling for life. So they were rightly punished.
The particular incident, therefore, has been addressed.
So why are protestors out there demanding justice for the braveheart, death for the culprits? I’ve got bizarre sms-es saying the culprits should be hanged by the end of the year.
So then we are told that this is about the larger issue – harsher laws, better enforcement, changing the medieval mindset, judicial reforms, police reforms. Sure that needs to be put into focus. But it can’t be done overnight. The protests will help if they keep the pressure on to get these issues addressed, as they must.
But why make it a Congress issue? Why ask for chief minister Shiela Dixit to resign? Why mock Manmohan Singh for not shedding tears like Barrack Obama did after the school shooting in the United States?(Let me hasten to add that I am no supporter of the UPA government or of the Congress party.). How will this larger cause be helped if police commissioner Neeraj Kumar is sacked?
They may currently be the symbols of al that is wrong with the way women’s issues and law and order issues are handled. But concentrating on attacking them will take the focus away from the need to address far more fundamental issues.
We need to separate the particular and general for any lasting solutions to emerge from our anger.