The judicial verdict on the Kumbakonam school fire tragedy that snuffed out 94 budding lives in July 2004 raises more questions than it answers. They range from the mundane and material to the metaphysical and beg to be addressed by more than just the judiciary.
The unwarranted ten year delay by itself is a gross denial of justice to the grieving parents, relatives and also the whole of society that stood stupefied in shock. And this is only the first rung in the long legal ladder. By the time theā āissue comes to full judicial closure the dead would have become ghosts even by the normal passage of time. In India this dreary drag goes under the logic: āLaw will take its own courseā. Are the courts that fix guilt, deliver sentences and impose penalties not liable to fast-track trials too or prioritise? Can the Kumbakonam incident be equated to, say, a land grab case? Just asking!
The criminal liability of those who run institutions and businesses defies determination. Ours is a crowded country and space and location, which are key to a business, are always at a premium. Shops and small entities form the bulk of the economy in terms of earnings and employment. Even the so-called service sector like primary education and basic health care are dominated by small players. These establishments not only operate cheek by jowl in ramshackle structures but also hang by thin profit threads. A look at any prime street of a TN town through the prisms of fire safety and stability would show that disasters are waiting to happen at every hour and at every corner. But such dire prospect itself is most distant in their daily drudgery. So, forget greed, even the basic urge of survival makes every small timer a potential candidate for criminal negligence.
The L&O mechanism queers the pitch even more. It finds it easy to lock up a small or medium entrepreneur owing to he being the visible employer and direct deployer of work and workers. But big players have the insulation of hierarchical buffers and at worst civil liability may accrue to their companies. Their physical distance from the scene of an accident also works to their advantage. How many big industrialists have been arrested for fatal mishaps in their factories or owing to use of their products? Indeed that would be deemed a dampner for business sentiment! The idea is not to exonerate anyone, not certainly the ones behind the Kumbakonam disaster, but the scales of justice beg to be balanced.
Officialdomās eagerness to make arrests is not necessarily owing to its zeal for justice but often only to cover its ass and sometimes its brass too. And this is invariably a selective process dictated by personal prejudices or political enmities or some private links. Much has already been said about the havoc on humanity caused by corruption, pre and post, such disasters. But what agitates us even more is the way the governing elite get away from culpable criminal negligence. Be it Kumbakonam or Porur or Pune, the official sins of commission or omission are always stark. But liability rarely attaches to a person in public pay whose bounden duty it is to serve and save that public. Instead the public pay a bigger price. At best, a small fry or a scapegoat is trapped in the legal loop only to slip through for want of sufficient evidence. Indeed the three pillars of the Constitution neither guarantee nor bear any liability for lives of citizens.
Can there be a compensation at all for the gory but wholly avoidable death of a child? Financial or non-monetary justice at the temporal level is tenuous as the near and dear of such tragedy victims would testify. The onus of liability naturally shifts to a different realm, the domain of faith and its franchisees on earth across religions. Of course there are soul-stirring sermons and sasthras explaining the inevitability of such incidents. Still every such horror hands out an indictment of the āhumanā in Him and shall haunt human credulity forever. After all, statutes and scriptures can never satisfy the debt owed to a grieving parent.
e-mail the writer at [email protected]