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Searching for Justice, but
where?
Priyaleen K
Renuka
 If you want to
be happy about the way public opinion and media crescendo over
denial of justice to deceased Ruchika and her suffering family and
friends has been eliciting some results, here are some pointers:
* India's Home
Minister P Chidambaram took some time off sending thousands of
troops to kill tribals and their revolting leaders and met Ruchika's
father and the Prakash family that has been fighting for justice and
expressed "unhappiness" at the way the CBI mishandled the case.
* Indian
authorities moved to snatch away the President's medal from child
molester former DGP SPS Rathore.
* Two new FIRs
have been lodged against Rathore, including one that argued for
slapping Section 306 (abetment to suicide) against Rathore.
* The Central
Bureau of Investigation too decided to appeal for a stiffer sentence
for Rathore who was sentenced to just six months in jail by a CBI
court on December 21 for molesting 14-year-old Ruchika in 1990.
* In Delhi,
Chidambaram said, "As Home Minister, I cannot pronounce any
judgment. I am very unhappy with the way the charges were framed and
the way the trial was conducted and the way the accused has been
punished."
 Haryana
Government has set up a Special Investigative Team (SIT) to probe
the two fresh cases registered against Rathore. The SIT would seek
assistance from the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) since the
agency had investigated the aspect pertaining to the alleged false
implication of Ruchika's brother Ashu Girhotra in carjacking cases.
The CBI had
probed this aspect during the course of investigations in the
Ruchika molestation case.
Top officials
said though the SIT would start afresh, while recording the
statements of witnesses and collecting evidence, it would like to
crossmatch the material evidence as well as the statements.
The CBI had
recorded the statements of lower level police officials of Ambala
district who had registered or were supervising the auto-jacking
cases.
So far so good,
but saner elements who are not given to using hyperbole as the
language of daily life and are not carried away by TV images of
groups holding candle lit marches and forming human chains are not
really very hopeful.
 In fact, they
are the most dejected lot.
And they have
their reasons. Ruchika's father wants justice. Her friend, Aradhana
Prakash Gupta, wants justice. By any stretch of imagination,
Aradhana and her parents, Madhu and Anand Prakash, are people of
formidable courage, a strong sense of justice and a remarkable
resolve to fight for it.
But this entire
agitation over Ruchika, all the efforts of the Prakash family and
the media campaign is leading us where in this search for justice?
To India's Home Minister? To Haryana CM? To the CBI? To the courts?
To the Supreme Court? To the Special Investigation Teams?
 Oh, come on,
please. These are the very agencies that denied you the justice in
the first place. Officer after officer of the police and the CBI
stayed silent for years. Large sections of the media preferred to
forget about you. The Prakashs' and the Girhotras' search for
justice was a lonely, frustrating struggle, conducted away from the
eyes of the media and in solemn silence of pain and with an
Everest-sized determination.
This entire
campaign for justice is somehow also trying to restore your faith in
the same hollow moth-eaten stinking institutions that deny justice
every single day to millions. It is time you revist the sociology of
law dispensing machinery in India that is designed more to deny
justice than deliver it. In this campaign to get justice for
Ruchika, we must pause and analyse if the agencies of the state are
actually benefitting from our struggle since they are not only
appropriating the space that was to legitimately belong to the
"Alternative" but are in fact projecting themselves as the
"Alternative" and asking to start believing in them once again, once
more.
Let us be just
to Ruchika. Let us not believe those who have never had the courage
of any conviction.
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The CBI: Shamed Again In
Ruchika Case
Even as the
Union Home Minister seemed to have assured some justice to the
family and friends of Ruchika, the shameful role of
India's
top sleuthing agency, the CBI, became more and more clear in the
case.
Legal experts
say the CBI had tied its hands and was in no position to demand
any action aaginst former Haryana police chief S P S Rathore,
molester of 14-year-old Ruchika and eventually pushing her to
suicide, since it had itself actually opposed the addition of
this charge before a Chandigarh trial court.
In 2001, when
Madhu Prakash, mother of Ruchika's friend Anuradha, filed an
application for charging Rathore under Section 306 IPC --
abetment of suicide-- which could have put the ex-DGP behind
bars for up to 10 years, the CBI opposed it.
The trial court
was not convinced by the CBI's opposition and accepted Madhu
Prakash's application. On Rathore's revision petition, the
Punjab and Haryana high court gave a reprieve to Rathore on
February 12,
2002, citing CBI's written opposition dated October 20, 2001.
While quashing
the abetment of suicide charge, Justice R C Kathuria of the high
court noted that CBI had opposed the framing of that charge
before the trial court after it had "thoroughly examined" the
statements of witnesses that Rathore had created "hell-like
conditions" for Ruchika.
It is because
of this order of Justice Kathuria passed on Rathore's petition
that the trial court was forced to confine itself to the lesser
offence of outraging modesty under Section 354 IPC, as proposed
originally by CBI in its chargesheet in November 2000.
Thus, CBI
proved to be soft on Rathore although another bench of the high
court had, while ordering the registration of an FIR in 1999,
again at Prakash's instance, entrusted the investigation to CBI
on the assumption that it was likely to be more independent than
the local police in probing the crimes inflicted on Ruchika.
Interestingly,
in the wake of the public outrage over the light sentence of six
months that Rathore got, the same CBI has now been asked by the
government to try and enhance the penalty before the appellate
court, in this instance, the high court.
Coming back to
the February 2002 high court order, the grounds on which CBI
opposed Prakash's 2001 application for charging Rathore under
Section 306 were:
* Ruchika was
expelled from her school merely because of non-payment of fees
and not because of any extraneous pressure.
* Ruchika's
grandfather, Daya Ram, and two of her maternal uncles, both
named N S Chauhan, certified that the cause of her death was the
medicines she was taking for reducing her weight and that they
had not suspected the involvement of anyone in her death
* Though he
claimed to have been falsely implicated by Rathore in theft
cases, Ruchika's brother Ashu did not make himself available for
CBI's examination.
* A chemical
examination report showed that Ruchika died because of poisoning
by chloro compound group of insecticides.
Though CBI did
not openly back Rathore's petition before the high court,
Justice Kathuria relied heavily on the agency's stand before the
trial court to conclude that no case of abetment of suicide was
on the face of it made out against the police officer.
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6
January 2010
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