What a lovely start to a new year. For all of us nervous about letting go and terrified of change, the first week of 2011 was very reassuring. Each day, we peered cautiously from under comforting blankets, fearing the worst. Okay, we could come out. The world hadn’t changed with the turn of the decade. We began each day with fresh news of rapes, murders, financial scams and failure of justice. All was well with our country.
Take the case of this Bihari schoolteacher stabbing to death the local MLA (member of the legislative Assembly). On January 4, Raj Kishore Kesri, 51, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MLA from Purnea, was knifed to death in public by Rupam Pathak, 45, a school principal. Kesri was meeting people at home when Ms Pathak, who had known him for years, walked in with a concealed kitchen knife and stabbed him. She was almost lynched by the MLA’s men. In hospital, she showed no remorse. “The MLA is a demon”, she said, of course, he wouldn’t die.
Till now, all we know about the MLA from public records of 2005 is that he had five serious criminal cases against him, including attempt to murder (Section 307 of the Indian Penal Code), attempt to commit culpable homicide (IPC, 308), voluntarily causing hurt (IPC, 323), wrongful restraint (IPC, 341), assault or criminally deterring public servant from discharging his duty (IPC, 353) and theft (IPC, 379), among other grave offences. He had not been convicted in any of these. In 2008, he had been charged with rape by another woman, but was given a clean chit.
Last year, Ms Pathak had accused Mr Kesri and his associates of raping her over three years. But in court, she withdrew the allegation. When the police gave the BJP MLA a clean chit, Ms Pathak filed a protest petition in court, saying she was bullied into withdrawing her charges. And now she has killed her accused.
Maybe she killed the MLA because she, like millions around the country and particularly in states like Bihar, had lost faith in the justice system. Because she believed that ordinary citizens like her would never be able to punish politicians like this MLA for even the gravest of crimes. Perhaps the bullying by the powerful to shut her up got to her. “It will be better if I am hanged”, said the desperate woman.
Or perhaps she was part of a murder conspiracy against Raj Kishore Kesri, as alleged by the BJP. The police have swiftly arrested the editor of Quisling, the local weekly that had first reported Ms Pathak’s complaint against the MLA. Or perhaps we will find out that the lady was of unsound mind and querulous character, as stated by some, and the MLA of admirable reputation and squeaky-clean character, as stated by some others.
With some luck and proper political affiliation of the murder accused, we may even find out that she didn’t kill him, and that sundry Hindi haikus were found in Kesri’s home, from which the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) had safely concluded that the MLA, being fond of Japanese culture, had committed harakiri at his morning durbar. (Nah, no Hindi haikus have been found as yet, I just made this part up.)
Fact is, we may never know what the real story is. But what we do know is that our MLAs and members of Parliament (MPs) are very often criminals who get away with murder and rape. A large chunk of our elected representatives in Parliament and in states like Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh are history-sheeters. With the police and sometimes even the courts working against them and for the powerful netas, the ordinary victim has no access to justice. Usually they hide in shame, their reputation destroyed, their lives in a shambles for trying to punish the powerful. Sometimes they kill themselves. And rarely, they attack their tormentor. All this signifies a terrible failure of justice.
Take the testimony of Nirpreet Kaur in a Delhi court on January 6. She gave a detailed eyewitness account of how her father was burnt to death as Congress leader Sajjan Kumar incited a lynch mob in 1984. The match that set her father, doused in kerosene by the mob, ablaze was provided by a police inspector. Nirpreet, then 16, saw it all, but could not save her father. Later, her demand for justice sent her to jail on several false charges. Accused under Tada (Terrorist and Disruptive Activities), she spent years in jail, but was later cleared in all cases.
Meanwhile, Mr Kumar flourished as a Congress MP. He was withdrawn as a candidate in last year’s parliamentary elections only after Sikh reporter Jarnail Singh threw a shoe at home minister P. Chidambaram at a press conference. The journalist had asked about the CBI’s giving a clean chit to Mr Kumar and Mr Chidambaram had given a vague and smug reply. Mr Singh was roughed up by Congress supporters, but the party recognised the importance of the shoe attack, and dropped Mr Kumar as a candidate 25 years after he had been accused of instigating the Sikh massacre. The cases against him were reopened.
But a frenzied attack in public is the last recourse of the desperate. These shouldn’t happen in a functioning democracy where people have faith in justice, where the police and the courts work. Sadly, our police act as the private army of influential netas and the courts very often give unjust verdicts that please the powerful. Among recent judgments, sentencing human rights activist Dr Binayak Sen to life imprisonment was one such. The Ayodhya verdict that did not even mention the demolition of the Babri Masjid and refused to acknowledge that it was a place of worship while accepting enthusiastically that Ram idols wrongfully placed there gave Hindus a two-thirds claim on “the disputed site” was another.
Every day, we see the failure of justice and the desperation that it breeds. We try to stem the rot by going after the disgruntled lot — whether they are desperate housewives like Rupam Pathak or organised killers like the Maoists. If we really want a clean state, we need to urgently clean up the mess that lies beneath. Then we could really have a Happy New Year.

Antara Dev Sen is editor of The Little Magazine. She can be contacted at:
sen@littlemag.com