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Manu Sharma out of jail on prowl, now back in Tihar
WSN Network

NEW DELHI: Senior Congress politician Venode Sharma's political career was not helped byu his son Manu Sharma when he walked into a bar and shot dead a model, Jessica Lall, because she would not serve him liquor after closing hours. From then on, it was one long chain of efforts to subvert the justice. An enraged middle class finally ensured that the culprit goes behind the bars for a life term.

In a peculiar turn of events, Manu Sharma was out again last month, on parole of one month, that was extended again by one more month. His reasons for parole? A sick mother and the urgent need to attend to family's corporate business.

For poor people the law sayd if you commit a crime, you will go to jail. But the rich and the powerful often breach the prison walls through several instruments like parole or special pardons under Constitution's Article 161 and come out of the prison as and when they can manage.

Manu Sharma was both rich and powerful. So the Delhi government was quick to grant him parole. His mother was found hale and hearty and was holding press conferences when she should have been in a hospital bed, ostensibly. And Manu Sharma instead of being by her sick mother's bedside, was found fighting in a pub in Delhi, a town where he simply could not have gone under parole rules.

There was so much uproar that Manu thought it a prudent thing to do to rush back to the Tihar jail on Thursday but the entire episode has left a distasteful aftertaste. In what kind of a country, political prisoners like Bhai Daljit Singh Bittu languish in jails and on death row while murderers like Manu Sharma are defended by well heeled politicians of Congress? How do our authorities decide on providing parole to convicted criminals? Is there a hidden rule-of-the-thumb that finds it easier to provide judicially sanctioned solace to some and deny it to others based on who the criminal is and what connections and `background' that person may have?

11 November  2009
 

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