Allow me a bit of self-praise and a confession. I scored good marks in school, never cheated, but once helped a buddy to cheat. The bloke copied my essay verbatim, and got caught by repeating my mistakes.
Our sleuths are as naive as my buddy at times. Look at the confessions of the 13 accused in the 2006 Mumbai train blast case (187 killed; 817 hurt). Making use of anti-terror laws that allowed confessions to cops as evidence, they got all the 13 to sing and sign their sins. It didn’t need rocket science for the Bombay High Court judges to find the statements were all from the same template, extracted through torture and tutoring. They read so similar—names, dates and deeds minorly altered—that the judges made comparative charts of the texts of the 13 confessions. Straight copy-paste jobs! Worse, even the police medics had recorded torture marks on the accused’s bodies. The court had no go but to let them go, a few weeks ago.
No different was the case of the necrophiliac of Nithari, Surinder Koli. The cops told us he had raped 20 young women and kids, killed them, had sex with the dead, chopped their organs, and even ate parts of them. We believed because, in our eyes he looked like Renfield, that servant of Count Dracula who eats spiders and bugs. In this case, a dark-skinned dalit, living in a large mansion with an evil lord who was away during the day pursuing his own sins.
Image: Shutterstock
But the law lords of the Supreme Court found the police story no more credible than one of old Magyar wives’ tales, and that Koli had been tortured and tutored to confess. He retracted on the confession in court; there was no trace of blood in the castle kitchen where he had killed 20 young women and kids, danced his necrophilic numbers, or ate his cannibalistic repasts. They also found the recovery of the murder knives and the dead ones’ bones from a drain was a stage-managed drama. They let him go, a mental wreck after having spent 18 years in the lonely death row and once having been readied for the gallows.
Both acquittals outraged us, honest citizens who had swallowed the police stories hook, line, sinker, limbs and bomb shards. To us, all the accused had fitted the villain bill—Koli because he was dark and a dalit, the other bunch because they followed a faith that the majority didn’t, were poor enough to be recruited for evil, smart enough to make bombs, and evil enough to trigger them in trains to kill people.
Officers of the law, it is time you changed your ways. Our colonial era laws are claimed to have been modernised, but your probe tools remain as darkly mediaeval as the Spanish Inquisition. Torturing suspects, tutoring witnesses and faking proofs will no longer get you conviction from smart defence counsel and wiser judges. Forensics offers you new ways of solving crimes. Try technology; it would work better and yield you better conviction rates.
Friends, Indians and countrymen! Shed your prejudices, or keep them aside when it comes to matters of justice. Stop getting outraged with the judges if they let go a few who you wanted to hang. Get outraged about the injustice done to the suspects who waste away their youth in prisons just because they had been born in the wrong caste or followed the wrong faith.
On a lighter note, remember Hercule Poirot’s words, in the film version of The Adventure of the Clapham Cook, to Captain Hastings who had the habit of jumping to conclusions: “Merely because a man does not offer you a drink, Hastings, does not mean that he is necessarily guilty of other crimes.”
prasannan@theweek.in