Amit Sengupta Delhi
When the Best Bakery judgement first arrived in the form of scathing observations by the Justices of the Supreme Court, in an acidic, perverse and claustrophobic scenario when Narendra Modi was behaving as a Hindutva God reincarnated and the BJP-led regime had lost the last remains of both humanism and morality, Supreme Court lawyer Colin Gonsalves told this reporter that this was "Indian judiciary's finest day". This was when the Constitution and justice system was turned meaningless in Gujarat after the 2002 state-sponsored carnage, and Modi and his organised machinery of xenophobes went about, first, ethnic-cleansing like the Nazis had done in Germany and Europe, and then, pumping their chests in megalomaniac glorification. We will repeat this "successful experiment" across the nation, warned VHP hate machine Praveen Togadia. That is the time when the Supreme Court's observations arrived, and it spread a wave of relief within the huge populace of battered, pluralist and secular Indians, who seemed to have lost all hope in the justice system. That is the relief we are chasing in this 'idea of injustice', looking for no miracle, but, basically, the hard reality of justice, from visible despair and bad faith to the essence of universal goodness and rationality. Every word in this cover story is stretching this threshold of disbelief, desperately seeking the wisdom of a constitutional democracy, subverted by those who are extracting the final juices of democracy, with abject insensitivity and brutality.
We are in the here and now of a rapidly-changing society where aspirations are rising so high that even the most condemned and exiled would not accept injustice lying down. To say that we are a superpower with 10 per cent GDP growth makes no sense to the two lakh undertrials whom the law minister wants to 'free' from their abject unfreedoms. It also makes no sense to those 77 per cent Indians who live on Rs 20 a day. Not even to those tribals, just about six per cent of the population, who are being dismantled by armed and corporate force, their bare bodies, magical folk narratives, and pristine ecology, being devastated by the big business of insatiable greed, backed by the Indian State and its gigantic armed machinery. If the brutalised nation and its survivors of carnages come first, then you don't have to wait for 25 years for the first chargesheet against Sajjan Kumar. And why should the friends and family of Ruchika trudge through infinite Kafkasque corridors of injustice and torture to seek justice with enlightened candles after 17 long years, while a big cop smirks for all the cameras? Why? Who will give back millions of Ruchikas their right to happiness and peace, to be a free citizen without fear or prejudice, in the largest democracy?
http://www.hardnewsmedia.com/2010/02/3437
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