India’s starkest social binary pertains to common people’s access to and treatment under the law. There are those who will be protected, like a former Aam Aadmi Party-turned BJP politician in Delhi seen on video inciting rioters in early 2020; or those outsiders in Jawaharlal Nehru University who went away scot-free after wreaking mayhem on campus. There are those who were or have been in prison on false charges for long, and there are those abroad with such wherewithal that they seem to toy with Indian law enforcement and diplomacy. There are those for whom a private jet will fly to the other end of the earth and return empty-handed, and there are those in India’s jails for whom even a sipper will be granted only after repeated pleas and agony. There will be no bail for the innocent, or even a trial, while law enforcers struggle to wriggle out alleged wrongdoers abroad. A comedy for the rich, the Indian criminal justice system is a tragedy for commoners, and that was the last straw for the sipper-seeking octogenarian who passed on two weeks ago. If the idea of India is plunging into the abyss, one wonders if the criminal justice system is the millstone around its neck ensuring it stays underwater.
To my mind, the current Indian justice system is three-faced. Here’s a ragtag list to vivify that view. Two discrete sets of cases that hit the national consciousness recently — and one set over the years — say much about the rich India, the old India, and the young India, in relation to the law. Individually and collectively, each of them is a bellwether on discrete and yet interrelated phenomena, namely, the economic fraud litigations against those abroad, the still unsolved murders of Narendra Dabholkar, M M Kalburgi, Govind Pansare and Gauri Lankesh, or the cases against the unjustly incarcerated and gradually released Disha Ravi, Devangana Kalita and Natasha Narwal. The justice system has shown different behaviours with respect to rich India, old India, and young India. It has been ham-fisted with the first, malevolent with the second, and minatory with the third.
While it appeared to browbeat India’s idealistic young, it took long to accede to some basic demands of the resilient old. Which is why, this writer took some perverse pleasure in the ways of the fugitive rich which made Indian law-enforcement run around in circles: Institutions that maltreated two categories of vulnerable people caught it from the powerful third. Recent reportage on someone’s resourcefulness in the West Indies made me ponder: How come one individual can bring Indian law-enforcement to its knees?
To some degree, that person’s actions find their equal in our other runaways. As citizens, we must cease to underestimate the power of the rich, the intelligence of our alleged charlatans and their outsized clout, for they show the mirror to our pretend democracy. Even with power, money and extremely sensitive information that could probably implicate people in power, it must take spunk, nous, and brio to be several steps ahead of the law.
On the other hand, there is old India’s treatment at the hands of the law. Pansare, Dabholkar, Kalburgi and Lankesh exemplified vintage Indian citizenship and constitutionalism. Since their murders in the beginning and the latter half of the 2010s, the law appears to have stuttered more than progressed. Why is justice taking so long? Are these cases bewilderingly complicated to take so many years? Why is the speed of the private jet in administering justice missing here? And to young India, the criminal justice system is abrasive because it can get away with impunity.
Oddly, though, the events of the week before only made me think of things that had happened a little earlier. Like, the Qatar Airways plane that flew from India to Dominica with a stopover in Spain. (Why didn’t our national carrier fly? No ‘vocal for local’?) What must our investigators have thought and spoken to and fro on the plane? Did they really expect to catch one person? With the young and old, Indian law-enforcement may have bit the final straw. But to my mind, it has perhaps got some karma earlier from the Caribbean.