Justice

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• 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.  » more
  
  

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• 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. » more
  
  
• 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. » more
  
  
• 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. » more
  
  
• 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). » more
  
  
• 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. » more
  
  

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• 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). » more