No Miscarriage Of Justice, Certainly Not This Time!

Crime has not been foreign to our country. In fact, we have witnessed high profile crimes and cases that eventually went forward to become national interests and also motivated changes in laws and order. One among these is the popular Delhi Gang Rape of 2012 that shook entire India and also made headlines across the world. This is one case that is classified among the ‘rarest of the rare’ cases and the entire world has been looking forward to the verdict against the accused.

Although all the living accused were sentenced to death (God knows when the sentence will be implemented though), the juvenile accused who was younger than 18 years of age at the time of the crime was sentenced to only three years according to the juvenile law. And, since the accused has served the three-year term now, he is set to walk free this December.

I have been seeing a lot of petitions being circulated requesting the Judiciary to prolong the punishment of the accused who is believed to have been the most dangerous and ruthless of all. Just because he was a minor at the time of committing the crime, of course, we cannot overlook the nature of the crime he committed.

Rape itself is among one of the most brutal crimes that one can commit. Destroying a woman completely, dragging out her internal body parts and attempting to kill her along with a male friend is surely not something that deserves a term of three years at a reformation centre. If the boy had the understanding and audacity of raping a woman and killing her, I don’t think he was anything lesser than the other accused just because he was not 18 years of age then.

Anyway, the number of petitions and pleas being made to the court to reconsider the victim’s sentence and put him behind the bars is certainly a good move. It is good to see that people are actually fighting for a girl who they did not know but are still concerned because India lost a braveheart daughter like her. Of course, despite the changes made in the law, rapes have not receded. But, if, in this case, the juvenile is tried in a way similar to that of adults, it will discourage minors from committing such crimes and create a fear in their mind.

We all think miscarriage of justice should not happen, at least not in this case!

So The Court Means It Was A Driverless Car? Seriously?

The much-awaited verdict of the Salman Khan hit and run case back in 2002 finally came yesterday leaving all his fans and Bhai himself joyous and celebrating. The Bombay High Court on Thursday, i.e., December 10, 2015, acquitted Salman Khan of all the charges on him in the hit and run case and he walked free from the court. Of course, this was a big moment to celebrate for all the Bhai fans and the social media immediately went viral with countless posts, some congratulating him, some expressing their disappointment and some others full of sarcasm and memes.

But amid all the funny messages, tweets and posts making rounds in the media, there is this serious question! Who was driving Salman Khan’s car that night? Did the court actually mean that neither Salman nor his driver was driving the car? Does this mean that the car was drunk? Or it was a driverless car? What exactly happened on the fateful night? C’mon Indian Judiciary, a person lost his life in the incident and a few others were injured. This amounts to murder if you remember! And murder is a punishable offence. An offence which should never be forgiven because every life is precious, whether it belongs to a rich or poor!

I don’t understand how an institution as large and prominent as the High Court can give such a verdict just because there aren’t proofs enough to prove anyone guilty. Or maybe things were manipulated because corruption is not something alien to us. But we consider our legal system, our Judiciary, among the three pillars of the society and if verdicts like this come up, will anyone trust the system? Isn’t it completely baseless and irrelevant to assume that no one actually drove the car that night because there are no proofs to prove it?

I can remember the double murder case of 14-year-old Aarushi and house help Hemraj in 2008 that met a fateful end in a similar way. There weren’t any valid proofs to prove anyone guilty in the case and the case was finally closed alleging the parents guilty of killing their own child. No, I am not saying that the Talwars did not murder their daughter or they are innocent, but on what basis were they convicted? As much as I know of the case, the servants in the house, i.e, the driver, compounder and one more aide had committed to have murdered the two in their narco tests. But, since narco tests are not admissible in the court as proofs, the case was shut down, claiming that the parents had killed Aarushi and Hemraj.

This is how our judicial system works! You never know who will accuse you of killing someone when you wouldn’t even be knowing the victim, or who would set you free for killing people (the latter is possible only when you have lots of money and contacts, of course)!