Our yellow towel rationalists, being vintage trail blazes, are always a step ahead. Even as the entire business community is abuzz with the fate of the Insurance Regulatory Bill, our home grown reformists have already begun their Puratchi with a sensational new insurance scheme that seeks to immunise the families of the wily and the wicked from the vagaries of silly laws and its heartless enforcers.
It is called Goondas Insurance Scheme and is open for enrolment to all those who have as their chosen avocation such holy activities as rape, murder, dacoity and so on. Perhaps, as an inaugural offer, the scheme has even included those goondas who burn live jailors and the list can soon be expected to expand to take in its realms as much of the lexicon of criminology as is inhumanly possible.
Though the Goondas of this rational land have always gone scot-free, they have never been able to breathe free owing to their zeal sometimes being curtailed by concerns for their near and dear. Not any more, for in their absence such responsibilities will now devolve on the considerate State which itself is a beneficiary of us, gullible tax-payers.
Henceforth, the goon fraternity need not needlessly worry about the future of their family–rather families, for these precious pisthas usually have a home in every pettai–and instead feel assured that the guilty-conscious State, after gunning them down, will also duly compensate for the loss of their lives. More so, if their atrocities are perpetrated inside the prison, where they are actually expected to meditate and reform.
They can now gleefully attend to their daily chores of rapes, extortions, killings and what not with gay abandon, with no fear in their minds, with their head held high and go about demolishing all domestic walls, including prison wall. If these law abiding outlaws get killed or are either fully or partially disabled during the course of exercising their fundamentalist rights, they or their kin would be entitled to not less than Rs 1.5 lakhs as solatium. Our rational CM would stand guarantee for that.
There are also opposition leaders who are ready to take up their cause and win them higher compensation, say Rs 5 lakhs, in recognition of their sterling services to the nation. From being wanted dead or alive with a reward accruing to those who secure them such, it is now possible that the fully insured Goondas may be too willing to walk into a police line of fire, and still make a fast buck…dead or alive.
This is a strange land, rendered stranger still by the play of populist, pedantic politicians. On the one hand we have our State excelling in collections for the Kargil fund while on the other we witness such wholly undeserving candidates, primarily sponsored by politicos of various hue, also benefitting from State charity. In that case, are there not more deserving cases among our teeming millions, whose families are also suffering?
Come to think of it, the politiciansâ psychology and approach is essentially the same, irrespective of the merit of the beneficiary. The sight of a dead body, the tears of grieving relatives, the agony of the situation and the prevailing tensions wrought by the inflammable prelude all offer a fertile political field for them to reap a bumper harvest (Courtesy: Pope).
It does not matter that the victims hail from such diagonally opposite ends of the moral spectrum as the heroic Kargil battle-front and an underground den. A gangster gets as much recognition and reward as a patriot. A hole in the head will do, no matter who he is. Merrier still, if the corpse happens to house a State bullet.
I am now forced to raise a point before some godforsaken NGO or human rights activist does, even if it entails the risk of getting shot by a sensible citizen, though there is no chance of a compensation from the very sensitive State. What of all those earlier âmartyrsâ such as Aasaithambi, Kabilan, Military Kumar and the like who all died in harness? Would they be now recognised posthumously in the form of belated solatium?
This will ensure that justice, though delayed, has not been denied to these immortal rowdies. After all in this country, there are always takers and sponsors for pardon and solace to heinous criminals and even assassins, while petty thieves and street corner pickpockets invariably get the rough end of the stick.
Bigger the crime, larger the sympathy and greater still, the support, particularly political support. Our dravidian rulers and their equally dravidian opponents have jointly and severally enhanced the worth of absolute criminality, thereby giving it an industry status!
The world outside the jail may never get to know who really precipitated the bloody crisis-the prisoners or the police. But Karunanidhi and his Law Minister aver hat the firing was essential and wholly warranted to control the violent situation. Then why should they fell guilty for felling such hardcore offenders who would have inflicted a greater carnage had they not been stopped? Obviously, the inmates of the jail had not gathered for prayer.
If what the government claims is true, it was an unlawful assembly in the true legal sense of the phrase, with the sole purpose of causing disturbances inside the prison, whatever be the provocations. And for their part, the police were well within law and their consciences too, to resort to force to quell the rampaging mob. Otherwise, they stood the chance of getting killed themselves as is borne by the live cremation of a jailor. And there was also a possibility of a large scale jail-break.
In any case, the firing would have been ordered only after consultations between the Home Secretary and top police officials and the order itself would have been issued only after clearance from the political leadership. Having taken such a conscious decision, why then does the State feel obliged to compensate for lives which were actually in the process of taking other lives?
Having formed an inquiry commission, could the government not have waited for the findings of the commission before embarking post-haste on the State charity binge? What if it turns out that one or more of the deceased were really instrumental in torching the jailor? Or is this misplaced sympathy a camouflage to hide the governmentâs own lapses, criminal or otherwise?
A good majority of the dead prisoners were being detained under the Goondas act and by normal police standards are always dealt with a pre-supposition of guilt-one has to be truly consistent and prolific to quality for detention under the Goondas act. Again, every member of an unlawful assembly is individually and severally liable for every act committed by such assembly.
Unless a bullet ricochets and knocks down an innocent bystander, no one from the assembly could be deemed entitled for compensation. As otherwise, our exchequer would start bleeding more profusely than those on that fateful Wednesday by just insuring the âvictimsâ of encounters and unlawful assemblies that are so commonplace in these turbulent times.
But our rational CM stands up in our very lawful Assembly and announces in tearful words that the families of those killed should not suffer and hence the compensation of Rs One lakh which was immediately hiked to Rs One and half lakhs on demand from a comrade. And not one of our eminent politicians seem to bother about this truly criminal waste of tax-payersâ money.
So, to further assuage its pricking conscience, the government can now contemplate initiating an award, aptly titled âKolaiâ mamani so that villains attain posterity besides prosperity.
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