A casualty count

A week of hectic judicial/legal activity has left a trail of victims, not all human. The Aarushi murder case crossed a threshold, the Sankararaman murder case came to a virtual closure and the Tehelka rape case attained critical mass. But acquittals, convictions or charge sheets apart, much collateral damage has been caused to certain other critical facets.

Reputation as an individual’s right has ceased to matter. Innocent till proved guilty is a legal canon observed more in breach. Indeed, it is well nigh impossible for a person charged with a crime to emerge unscathed from the public trial, even if he were to survive the law. Rather, higher the profile, dicier the target. While a finger can be pointed at the people’s insatiable appetite for gossip and scandal, the media cannot also escape the damning four fingers pointing inwards. The law hangs a convict only once and in all privacy. But the media hangs just an accused a million times and for all to see. Can the acquittal compensate the Kanchi Acharyas for all the vilification they were subjected to by media for close to a decade?

Discrimination is a deadly minefield. Even safe, sage, sane minds find it difficult to navigate through the chaotic traffic of fact and fiction and often get entrapped in error. Discretion is a folly in a scenario wherein public discourse is dominated by trigger happy twitteratti out to outwit peers and outdo themselves. The reward for restraint is irrelevance and even oblivion, something no one with a point of view and the means to air it, can reconcile to. And judgement about the rights and wrongs in an issue could be a nasty boomerang because experience and intuition get overruled by the frenzy of the moment. The ‘flowery, Shakespearean rhetoric’ in the Aarushi judgement has given room to the feeling that even the judiciary is not immune to these foibles.

Faith in the law enforcement mechanism is another casualty. While the judiciary has the last word, there are many a procedural paragraphs that precede and even prompt the final sentence. All those are written by the law enforcement agencies that bow to the rulers. Clearly, political will can fix a person, rightly or wrongly. And when the investigative agencies themselves are prone to prejudices and shoddy work, ‘due process of law’ becomes a misnomer. When every criminal inquiry, be it by the CBI or a constable, becomes questionable in terms of motives and methods, wither belief?

But the graph of faith in human nature is showing a greater dip. Any crime news, howsoever outrageous, is easily believed even before confirmation because curiosity keeps alive this mischievous cat. That doting parents can kill their daughter is no easy matter to digest despite the stamp of judiciary. And amidst justified suspicions of a botched investigation and involving as it does a possible fatal flaw in parental psychology, every ounce of legal energy has to be expended to establish guilt beyond even the usual norms of reasonable doubt. Yet, the entire Aarushi episode has been one of criss-crossing crass sensationalism rather than a matter for silent soul search.

Again, is the clearance of the names of the Kanchi Acharyas any consolation for the many who genuinely suffered a crisis of faith and are now reeling in remorse mode? But if anything can be worse than the fall in faith in a religious issue, it is the failure of faith in one’s own nature. ‘I cant trust myself to behave’ tantamounts to self-annihilation. The graveness of Tejpal’s ‘crime’apart, the piling e-mails, most certainly self-incriminating, are a candid commentary of the fallibility of human nature … when no one is watching!

That a man who positioned and projected himself as the epitome of elite intellectual refinement and an unrelenting moral police cum judge can fall to so primal a passion is proof of that pudding. In today’s promiscuous and paranoid world, one has to not only to look beyond one’s shoulders, but between them too. Who knows when the beastly five senses will exercise their brute majority over the sixth!

But the ultimate victim is truth, lost beyond salvage in this dizzying maze and melee. For instance, who killed Sankararaman?

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