India's left-illiberal, communitarian cabal needs to be told justice is not an irregular verb
Teachers at the better schools in India from the 1940s through till the 1990s spent a half-century teaching pupils English grammar and all its tortuous but nonetheless essential rules. When it came to irregular verbs, the most oft-cited example was: I perspire, you sweat like a pig. Or words to that effect. In contemporary India, where the wheels of justice turn exceedingly slowly but they do, in the main, turn, those who would hang someone on the basis of their bias are utterly shameless in using justice as an irregular verb to aid their political, business, professional or personal interests and rivalries as the Supreme Court pointed out in its scathing order on Thursday rejecting a bunch of Public Interest litigations (PIls) asking for a probe into the natural death of CBI Judge Brijgopal Harkishan loya who was hearing the Sohrabuddin Sheikh encounter case. For this lot, deeply illiberal and implacable foes of the Rule of law in this country, it's always like so — if the court agrees with them it is upholding the law and if it doesn't it's a travesty of justice!
In rejecting the demand for a probe into the death of Judge loya iterating the principle that while all deaths are unfortunate not every death is a murder and calling out the motivated, scurrilous and, frankly, criminally defamatory utterances of the petitioners and the despicable conduct of their counsels who made wild and sweeping allegations against anyone who did not agree with their narrative, a three-judge Bench of the highest court in the land headed by the Chief Justice of India also called them out for effectively trying to ‘fix' BJP president Amit Shah. But such is the sense of entitlement of these media-activists, lawyer-activists and academic-activists, who have probably forgotten what it's like to be plain professional journalists, lawyers and academicians (respectively) without these hyphenated suffixes if they ever were to begin with, and the churlishness and vindictiveness of their political backers, that the latter have responded by harping on the same issues settled by the Supreme Court instead of accepting the verdict with good grace. Indeed, moves are now afoot to impeach the Chief Justice of India for having the temerity to go by evidence and due process in the Judge loya probe PIls. Their collective conduct is an utter disgrace and damages the very institutions they fraudulently and self-servingly claim they are acting to protect.
A similar use of justice as an irregular verb was also on display Friday; it's a pattern, make no mistake. Gujarat High Court overturned the conviction by the sessions court of former State Minister Maya Kodnani in the 2002 Gujarat riots cases. And all the usual suspects started making the usual noises about justice having been derailed. Till some bright spark must have pointed out to them that in the same judgment letting Kodnani off because of a complete lack of evidence to prove that she encouraged the rioters, 31 others including Babu Bajrangi had their convictions upheld so selective criticism of a High Court verdict may not be such a great idea. Of course, whether in the loya or the Kodnani cases, those aggrieved are at complete liberty to avail of the legal remedies available — a review and/or curative petition in the case of the former and an appeal to the Supreme Court in the latter. But that's for those who believe in institutions and due process.
The day innuendo, allegation, surmise and assumption become the basis for the process of justice delivery in this country, we would have achieved the much-vaunted status of a Banana Republic presided over by its privileged, entitled, malcontents. But till then, let it be clear: There is no cure for suspicious minds. Suspicions, to be treated as credible by the criminal justice system, must not be limited to the minds of those with a priori assumptions about guilt and innocence but must be about the presence of suspicious circumstances and evidence on record of the same needs to be presented before the law courts for them to take cognizance. Those are the rules of the Rule of law game. Those who play fast and loose with them should be treated with the contempt their biases, prejudices and bigotry deserve.