Indian television stops being colorful and loud, from its orgy of soap operas, reality TV programs, on-screen emotional dares and explosions and even the quickies between news broadcasts on the more ‘serious’ networks, when you click the remote on real reality TV. I haven’t switched on the television since pirated movies started streaming the internet for free, and I haven’t switched it off since justice transferred being defined in the law courts to Satyamev Jayate.
Far off from the Supreme Court where one young man was being granted bail for raping a young woman because he was too young to go to jail as per the law, a case of a family hiring a hit-man to murder their own daughter along with her lover for eloping with him was being wrapped in a tightly zipped-up sack, never to be seen again. The neatly done black box contains two dead bodies, the male victim having been killed quite brutally and painfully over the course of a few hours, and female victim less painfully so, but equally illogically.
And the best part? This case, instead of popping up in the Supreme Courts for even a fair trial, comes up, years later, on a television show. The gravity of this sentence is almost as deep as the dark pit this crime now lies in. No matter how splattered the front page of the newspaper is with blood, if all the tight-lipped crimes came to light, every single page would be bathed in nothing but blood. Every now and then, justice gets thrown out the window like the next dead person they have to chuck away. There are crimes kept so well hidden, that the only place they are even made aware of is the T.V. screen. We might put our popcorn away for this show, but can the same be said for the courts?
There is a very strong reason why crime is run so rampant in our country; the laws are weak at best, the punishment, if at all served, is weaker, and justice system is the weakest. Agreed, our country has an astronomical population to tackle every single crime that gets committed. But the amount and depth of the crimes that get unnoticed, or worse, sealed and hidden, is inexcusable. People commit crimes and then commit another one to cover it up – to ensure it never reaches the court enough to put them in jail. What do you do with a family that kills their own daughter for taking her own decision for her own marriage? With another that kills their newborn because it’s a girl?
India’s justice system is so painful it makes one wish there was no justice system because the public mass would definitely give out quite the deserving punishment. But as it turns out, one can’t do that. Funny – there are strict laws to protect the guilty, but not enough to protect their victims, and certainly not enough to let a case be taken to court.
Well, on the bright side, just because the courts don’t take to law doesn’t mean all hopes are dead. Even if it’s just television, it is a huge hope for those suppressed by money, crime and power. If it hadn’t been for the show, many of us wouldn’t even have known the depth of the failure of the law, we wouldn’t have known the intensity of crimes that go on unnoticed in our country. If it hadn’t been for the show, I wouldn’t have been writing this article, which I hope has told you a story you didn’t already know.
