Justice

B

• Between The Sacred And The Profane in Justice: This is a day bracketed by the 20th anniversaries of two events. Neither should have happened. Both made us uglier as a nation and as a people. Both betrayed something that the framers of our Constitution, men and women who struggled to give us shape and form, held sacred. » continue reading
  
  

C

• Children of a lesser God in Justice: Environmentalists and human rights activists cheered last month when the Central Government’s Ministry of Environment & Forests rejected Vedanta’s bauxite mining proposal in Niyamgiri, Orissa. Predictably, the motives behind the rejection were soon questioned. Jairam Ramesh was accused of political deviousness in targeting a ‘beneficial’ project in a non-Congress state.  » continue reading
  
  
• Chronicle Of A Rape Foretold in Justice: Without comment: » continue reading
  
  

D

• Defeating Justice in Justice: Ram Singh, the prime accused in last December’s ghastly gang-rape in New Delhi, is said to have hanged himself from a ventilation grill in his cell in Tihar Jail. The officials call it suicide, but the improbabilities are impossible to ignore. There were other inmates in the cell. None, it is claimed, heard or saw anything. There was a guard on duty outside the cell, which has a grilled door through which the entire cell is visible. The guard saw nothing though, in the normal course, he’d have walked past this cell at least five times between the time Ram Singh was last seen alive and when he was found dead. The ventilation grill from which Ram Singh is said to have hanged himself is much higher than he could have reached, given his height. He had an injured right arm. There are far too many questions here. None lend themselves to a satisfactory answer.  » continue reading
  
  
• Do Unto Others As The Law Would Have You Do in Justice: A practicing dentist in Galway, Ireland, Savita Halappanavar was, at 31, several weeks into a pregnancy when she was taken to hospital complaining of back pain. Though she was miscarrying and the attending physicians knew the baby she was carrying had no hope of survival, yet they would not operate. Mrs Halappanavar begged for her life; she pleaded for an abortion. The doctors told her that they would not, and that an abortion was illegal because the fetus’s heart was still beating. They knew that not intervening then put Savita in a life-threatening situation. When they did, it was too late.  » continue reading
  
  

L

• Look Back In Anger in Justice: Mumbai Mirror’s lead article of 7 November by Meenal Baghel, the paper’s editor, is one filled with blistering anger. The immediate trigger is the recent horrifying rape in Bandra, but Meenal voices something many of us feel: helplessness and impotent rage as we see a city we knew, grew up in, and learned to love and forgive, is annihilated. » continue reading
  
  

M

• Made Of Dishonour in Justice: Beyond the shock, there is shame and disgrace. A little over a year ago, two young men, Reuben Fernandez, 28, and Keenan Santos, 25, were killed when they tried to save their friends, both young women, from harassment by a gang of thugs. This month, a 19-year-old youth, Santosh Vichivara, was fatally stabbed five times by a group of youngsters when he attempted to defend the young lady with whom he was conversing against the gang’s lewd comments and taunts. A policeman in Amritsar tried to defend his daughter against harassment by a local political satrap; the policeman was shot to death. And in Kolkata, once the bastion of intellectual civilization, a man beheaded his sister on a public street for ‘shaming’ his family’s honour. » continue reading
  
  

N

• Nonentity: An Identity Without An Address in Justice: It’s a familiar story in India. Whether it’s a mobile phone connection, a bank account, investments or an Internet connection, you must have “proof of address”. Not just any proof; it must be a passport or an electricity or landline telephone bill, and the address must be local. In an age of increased mobility, in a world where travel is this easy, at a time when people are used to shifting to different cities for jobs, this is just absurd. » continue reading
  
  
• Nutan’s Law in Justice: What happened in July in Guwahati to a young student is beyond horrifying: a woman leaving a nightspot was set upon by an entire gang of men who jeered, shoved, tore at her clothes, dragged her by her hair while a local TV station gleefully filmed it all. Sure enough, clips were broadcast on television and started doing the rounds on social networking sites and cellphones. Later reports accused a single hoodlum and a TV journalist of conniving to arrange this, something that only exacerbates the crime and calls into question our perverse notion of what is, or should be, “news”. » continue reading
  
  

P

• Prosecution By Deception in Justice: A little over four years ago, on the night of 16-17 May 2008, 14-year-old Aarushi Talwar was found dead in her bedroom at her family’s residence in Noida. A day later, the family servant, Hemraj, was also found dead. Aarushi’s parents, Rajesh and Nupur Talwar, are the main accused. From the start this has been a bewildering case, with the newspapers reporting one inconsistency after another, the trading of allegations on both sides, and the periodic uncovering of yet another bizarre surrounding circumstance. Had this been the stuff of a novel or a movie, people would have found it less than credible. And yet, in this as in so many other things, life is proving itself stranger than the strangest fiction. » continue reading
  
  

T

• The Burden Of Proof in Justice: It’s one of the three oldest professions known to man. The other two, prostitution and smuggling, are on the wrong side of common social acceptance; and law — criminal law in particular — has always existed in a slightly murky twilight zone between good and evil, right and wrong. The fact that lawyers make a living out of something as basic as justice makes them a favourite butt of jokes (“why won’t a shark attack a lawyer? Professional courtesy”), and the best always seem to echo a truth. Given the legal penchant for ‘maxims’, there’s a Latin phrase for this: in joco veritas. In jest there is truth. » continue reading
  
  
• The Devil In Our Midst in Justice: Every few months I find myself circling back to this issue. On a daily basis, there’s a grim reminder in the morning newspapers: yet another rape. There are so many so often now that we are in danger of seeing the victims reduced to meaningless statistics. » continue reading
  
  
• The Evil That Men Do in Justice: Titus Andronicus is the bloodiest and most gruesome of Shakespeare’s tragedies; the scholar and critic Clark Hulse, of the University of Illinois and a contributor to the Cambridge Collections, reckons that the play averages five atrocities in each act, one every 97 lines. Perhaps the worst is the gang-rape and mutilation of Lavinia, Titus’s daughter. In Julie Taymor’s 1999 film adaptation of the play, with Anthony Hopkins as Titus, this horrifying scene shows Lavinia after her rape seated on a tree-stump in a devastated landscape, her tongue cut out, her hands chopped off. The sequence is particularly startling because it makes no overt attempt to shock. » continue reading
  
  
• The Nirvana Fallacy in Justice: When we set about refashioning the law to better secure justice, populism is our worst enemy. It leads us into framing statutes that look good on paper but are impossible to enforce, or, worse, do not achieve their objective. » continue reading
  
  
• The poisoned earth in Justice: Two decades, 20 years, a fifth of a century; these words elongate time and, used in certain contexts, force into the dimness of memory matters that should never be forgotten. There have been, in human history, and most often in the last century, epochal periods of unspeakable horror, times when we seemed to have lost our humanity. We survived each — barely — and each time we swore never again, only to see the cycle repeat itself. To some victims we built memorials and monuments. For others, we concocted catch phrases and slogans. Then there were those that we let slip into the obscurity of a past because confronting the perpetrators and seeing justice through for the victims was simply uncomfortable. Time is not always a great healer; it is too often an excuse for timidity, and it can be the greatest betrayer of justice. » continue reading
  
  
• The Right Not To Be Raped in Justice: Come June 25, and if the Baba Ramdev circus and roadshow haven’t hijacked common sense by then, India’s capital is slated to see a protest march of a very different kind: India’s first “Slut Walk”, a global march protesting sexual violence against women. » continue reading
  
  
• The Tears Of Our Children in Justice: Not a week passes when on the city, sometimes the nation, pages of every national daily there isn’t a report of some horrific atrocity against a child. A 6-year-old raped in Shahapur (7 July); a 16-year-old gang raped in Ghaziabad (23 June); a 5-year-old gang raped in Chennai (4 November 2006); another in Panvel (4 January 2010); a six-year-old raped and murdered in Bhayander (13 June 2010). This month, a young man has been arrested in Kurla, suspected of having raped and killed three minor girls. In June, a 41-year-old man repeatedly raped his teenage daughter, impregnated her, forcing an abortion (13 June 2010). » continue reading
  
  
• Things Fall Apart in Justice: Welcome to hell. One incident shocks us and then is pushed back in memory as another horror takes its place, and then a third, and a fourth. We just don’t know when it will stop and you cannot help thinking that the human race is like a virus infecting this planet. » continue reading
  
  
• To Forgive And To Forget in Justice: In early 1977, Jacobo Timerman, the publisher of a liberal newspaper in Argentina, was arrested by the military junta. For some time previously, he had used his newspaper to publish accounts of government brutality and human rights violations. After his arrest, Timerman was kept in isolation, blindfolded for long periods and subjected to brutal torture with an electric cattle prod. He was finally released in 1979 and his 1981 book Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number is a harrowing account of his years of imprisonment. Never sentimental, the book has the dispassion of a professional journalist; this only makes it the more horrifying. But Timerman was a Jew, and his captors were anti-Semitic, and what troubled Timerman most, what he could not understand or reconcile, was the unreasoning hatred for his being a Jew. » continue reading
  
  
• To Seek Justice; Not Revenge in Justice: There is another victim of the Delhi gang-rape case and, as is its lot, it is silent. When we talk of amending the law to provide for chemical castration, the death penalty and other forms of state-sponsored brutalisation, we are not seeking justice. We seek revenge, and revenge is not justice. Baying for blood pulls us into the gutter too, to the level of the perpetrators of that New Delhi horror.  » continue reading
  
  

W

• Where The Truth Lies in Justice: Unless I am very wrong, the date this article appears in print is one of only three such dates every century; and each one is special. 11-11-11, like 10-10-10 and 01-01-01 are all binary in appearance. (Of course, should you have the luck to read this at eleven minutes past an hour before noon, you should consider yourself twice blessed: 11-11-11-11-11). » continue reading