What you and I suspected (and perhaps believed) for long has now been confirmed by a court of law. Vikas Yadav and a brother of his have been convicted for the abduction and murder of Nitish Katara. And today’s verdict brings to an end the saga of three high profile murder cases each of which was uniquely different but each of which shared an intangible common thread. The shooting of Jessica Lall, the rape and murder of Priyadarshini Mattoo and the abduction and consequent murder of Nitish Katara – each a crime of a different nature committed by unrelated protagonists; yet each a crime which represented the catharsis of a rapidly changing urban India and which more importantly shook, tested and finally to a certain degree vindicated the faith of the urban middle class in the country’s judicial system. Each case involved a cold blooded crime, each had an accused with powerful police and political links and in each case the process of justice was tried to be subverted through every possible way. In two of them, the defense actually succeeded at the trial stage before the prosecution was redeemed by the Delhi High Court. It is to the credit of Neelam Katara and the prosecution lawyers that Nitish Katara’s case did not suffer the same fate in the trial court. In spite of a six year long trial, repeated witness absences and hostilities, the court managed to pass the only logical verdict possible in the litigation.

Do I seem biased? Had I made my mind even before the trial about the guilt of an accused man? Am I as guilty as the media of pre-judging a case and passing a verdict even before the trial has been completed? Perhaps I am. But consider the Nitish Katara episode – a young man in the prime of his life is murdered on the outskirts of Delhi. His head is split open by being bashed with a heavy object and his body set on fire to avoid identification. Eyewitnesses see him last being escorted out of a social function by two heavily built men. One of them is the goonda and criminal son of a goonda, muscleman and criminal Member of Parliament (all in that order of achievement). The father son due are the acknowledged bahubalis of a Delhi suburb and have a range of criminal cases pending against them. The son is considered the prime suspect by the police. The motive is established when the victim’s mother discloses the intimate letters and cards sent by the accused’s sister to the victim. There is photographic evidence of the two (batch mates from a MBA program) together and the sister post the murder is packed off to the UK for further studies. The big picture – Just because Vikas Yadav did not like Nitish Katara dating his sister, he abducted him along with a couple of like minded goons and killed him in cold blood. The still bigger picture – A Jessica Lall was bumped off by a Manu Sharma, the son of Congress MLA with powerful contacts in the administration and police, in the presence of a page three crowd just because she refused to serve him a drink as the bar at a private party was closing. A Priyadarshini Mattoo was stalked by a fellow law student (son of top ranking cop in Delhi Police) who finally decided to enter her house, rape her and go on to murder her brutally.

The bottom line – In urban India, you can shoot, rape, abduct and kill someone whom you do not like (Vikas Yadav) or whom you do like (Santosh Singh in the Mattoo case) or someone who just annoys you with a refusal (Manu Sharma) at the drop of a hat and then walk away as if nothing happened. You can care two hoots for the law and sit back and relax because your Daddy dearest has contacts in the police who will subvert the investigation for you, he has the money that will allow you to hire expensive defense lawyers who have sold their conscience and morality to money (Ram Jethmalani) and also arrange for your defense to buy out/ threaten prime witnesses who decide to depose against you. And voila! In no time are you back at home declared a free and wrongly condemned man.

Is it any surprise then for you to see where the sympathies of the media and the general public lay in each of these cases? You might argue that for the media it made a David vs. Goliath, the corruption of the lower judiciary, subversion of justice and such other kind of juicy stories. But what of the general public? We were not in it for the stories and we certainly did not wish convictions in each of these cases because we had something to sell. We identified and sympathized with the victims because deep down we realized that it affected us. That instead of Jessica Lall it could have been one of us at that party, that instead of Priyadarshini it could have happened to one of us in our Delhi University days and that instead of Nitish Katara we could find ourselves being butchered by a non-approving brother with his musclemen. In each of these instances, the victims were young middle class educated urban Indians trying to make a life for themselves in an honest way. And in each of these cases, they found themselves slain by those who thought they could get away with anything. Is it any surprise for you then why we sympathize with the Lalls, Mattoos and Kataras of this world?

For if the young and the educated have to seek a future in this country then its courts must guarantee them protection from the wolves like Vikas Yadav who roam our streets with impunity, who drive in their tinted glasses SUVs, run people over under their luxury cars, threaten those around them on the hollow strength of their musclemen and believe that money and power can protect them from anything. The Indian state needs to show these illegitimate sons of illegitimate and corrupt power their true place. And the only way to that is through indiscriminate policing and judicial enforcement of laws.

The natural process of law enforcement requires us to presume a man innocent till he is proved guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. That is the only moral obligation that our courts cast upon us. We are not obliged to feel for them or extend any benefits of doubts to them. If they are found guilty at the end of a fair trial they deserve their dues. And you and I can argue whether they would have got away with their subversive and manipulative tactics in our courts had not their every move been scrutinized by an intrusive, aggressive, perhaps pre-determined but certainly a vigilant media. For once a witness turning hostile or forensic report being fudged gained more prominence than a female actor’s evening gown. For once this aggression made you and me believe that something fishy was going on and we all stood vindicated as the courts delivered their verdicts.
The wheels of justice turned, albeit slowly, but surely. And at the end of it I have only three words for the three convicts who thought their fathers could get them through anything – rot in hell. They may rest assured that Indian prisons would be much worse off than that.

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In a pose that would do any politician proud. This is after the win...and the excitement was palpable. At one stage Delhi seemed in trouble, but Dinesh Karthick played an uncharacteristically aggressive knock to guide his team home. I am wearing the Daredevils jersey which i had bought just before the game for a thousand bucks (!). Worth the money, as the team won. And now they are in the semis, so i have another day to wear the jersey. :)

A delirious crowd after the Daredevils had completed the victory.....

Sachin Tendulkar is clean bowled and the crowd at Kotla erupts. Uptil then we a chant of 'Sachin! Sachin!' was rverberating all around me (and i was joining in as well). The moment his leg stump went for a toss, i instinctively found myself jumping out of my seat. Something that has never happened before in the 19 years of my watching Tendulkar play. Mr.Modi, you can count me amoungst those who have taken to city based loyalties.

The view from where i was seated. First innings, Jayasuriya has just started to open up his arms against the Delhi bowlers.

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There is a certain sense of identification associated with a tragedy. It is popularly said that every American alive on that date remembers exactly where they were and what they were doing when they first heard of the Japanese bombing of the Pearl Harbour and the assassination of President Kennedy. Tragedies, particularly the sudden, unforeseen, irregular and unexpected ones have a shaking up effect. One might think that natural disasters like cyclones and earthquakes occur so frequently that we have become numb to their havoc, but the fact is that it is not the extent and the magnitude of the damage but the complacency which it shatters that makes a tragic event leave a scar. Sometimes, for the unfortunate ones, on the body and almost permanently on the mind. Independent America never thought an enemy would reach its shores and bomb its naval base or smash its proudest towers into dust with such impunity. In those heady days of hope in the early 60s no one ever thought that a President so loved by his people would be so brutally killed on the street. When traders stepped into the Bombay Stock Exchange on a sunny morning in March of 1993, nothing unusual was expected. It was business as usual. Stock exchanges never had been targeted through an act of violence and on that spring morning too there was nothing to defy the belief. Nothing to indicate that the Sarojini Nagar market where one picked such nice bargains would ever be abandoned all alone with a bomb. No reason or historical fact to presume or believe that when people walked in for a laser show at the Lumbini park in Hyderabad, some of them would not be returning home.

We never believe that tragedy can strike – either at us or a few feet away from us or for that matter at those spots where we frequently dine, shop or eat or in that city in which unhindered movement we take for granted. And it is because we do not expect it to happen to us, to our places, to our town and to our city that when it actually does happen, it leaves us numb.

Tonight, another Indian city has had its first brush with terror. Jaipur has withstood seven bomb blasts one after the other. Each timed to perfection, placed meticulously and each kept to go off in places where ordinary people like you and me would go on ordinary days to perform ordinary activities thinking nothing extraordinary could ever happen. Well, tonight it did. 60 people are dead and more than a 150 are injured. And a vibrant, bustling and busy city has lost what it can never regain – innocence. More than 200 families spend this night in anxiety, pain, agony and despair. Men, women and children – all out on daily routines of life have been punished for just that – living. Not for committing murders or looting or demolishing mosques or temples but simply because they did that one simple thing that all of us strive to do – live our daily lives. To say that their death is a waste of human life is an understatement. The answer to the ‘Why’ behind their death is even more eluding and frightening. Why did men so upset and angry about what is happening with their religion in the bloody streets of the middle - east turn towards innocent people thousands of miles away to express that anger? Expect no simple answers.

My only brush with terror, if I may call it that, came when three serial bomb blasts shook Delhi in late October of 2005. It was a couple of days before Diwali and I was on my way home looking to a week long break when the radio broke the news. One of the blasts took place at a chaat stall in the Sarojini Nagar market. An innocuous eatery at a busy market, crowded with hungry Diwali shoppers. Everytime I now go to Chandni Chowk and stand near the Town Hall to eat the Dahi Bhallas, my heart invariably skips a beat of awareness. A busy eatery at the corner of a congested lane. Shoppers, customers, cyclists and rickshaw pullers all milling around. Electric wires hanging overhead and a footpath with hardly any space to walk in the normal course, let alone run in case of a need. A perfect setting I say to myself everytime I stand outside that lane to eat. A perfect setting I say to myself whenever I am at the railway stations. Crowded platforms, unmanned metal detectors that do not work, no screening of baggage and no CCTVs. One can walk into a train with a bag of explosives without even being touched or stopped.

In a country where the value of life is so cheap, such blasts as those borne by Jaipur will not blow the wax out of our ears. Unfortunately the death and the injuries of those 200 odd citizens will not force the Indian state to sit up and acknowledge that it does not have an anti-terror policy and that it needs to urgently draft one. That’s its Intelligence set up needs drastic streamlining and restructuring. That’s its police needs reforming and should be out patrolling our streets rather than being holed up in the VIP zones of our cities. We are a soft state not because we do not have the resolve to act against terror but because we are not able to instill a fear of law in them and play the game with as much single mindedness and brutality as they do.

And while the Indian state ‘reflects’ on another set of lives lost and damaged, you and I can only do what we do everyday. Get out on the street and live our lives. Walk the roads, travel the footpaths, shop at the markets, eat at the roadside eateries, and venture out on Diwalis at crowded and potentially unsafe markets. You and I must continue to live our lives even though on days such as today we may never be able to trace our steps back home, even though on days such as today events may not leave us with the bodily resources to walk back home, even though on days such as today we may be facing the prospects of funeral pyres. You and I must walk the roads, for the right to live is a right greater than any enshrined even in our Constitution. It’s a right granted by humanity. And you and I must not allow any person to browbeat us into mortgaging it away.

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Ferozshah Kotla from the top tier stand under floodlights as Delhi take on Banglore

CP gets blocked as the cops watch...it would be another 15 mins in the sun before the road was cleared

Medicos are out on the streets chanting slogans against Arjun Singh....again

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