Justice is a joke...

The lovely young girl stared back at me from the front page of the newspaper. She is forever fourteen and unavenged. No one cares for her anymore. No one asks for justice for that forgotten piece of humanity who would be almost seventeen had she been alive. Only her parents are perennially haunted by her pleading eyes. How can such a brutal murder be so easily wiped from our collective memories?

Aarushi was found with her throat slit in her bedroom in May 2008. The domestic help was found dead on the terrace a day later. Her parents were asleep in the next room at the time of her murder. Three people were arrested and then released due to lack of evidence. The premier Indian investigative agency, the CBI, has announced that they cannot solve the case and that it would be closed. The level of incompetency is baffling – was there not even trace evidence left behind? Or is the CBI so technologically regressive that basic crime-solving aids are not in place?

The media did its part as well. First the character of the girl was called to question – she might have been found in a compromising state with the domestic help and therefore killed to protect the family ‘honour’. Then the character of the girl’s father was suspect – he was jailed and tormented with questions and baseless allegations. In what kind of a country is the victim’s family torn apart mercilessly in the media with no evidence? If her probable killers can walk away scot free because the CBI bungled the case, why are they not being investigated by the media?

There is simply no answer to any of these questions. There is not the least bit of humanity involved in the way the whole case was handled. Mysterious disappearances of swab results from the Noida hospital entrusted with the post mortem remain completely unexplained. It is not a simple oversight but a long list of compounded errors that led to the premature closure of this horrific case. Maybe we should just get rid of the CBI – an overly expensive institution that has more failures to its credit than can be justified. Meanwhile the case must be kept open. This cannot be a country where we fear to leave our children in their rooms at night. Whenever women are attacked on the streets, its always their morality or manner of dressing that is believed to be the cause – can the same be said of a girl sleeping at home?

What a happy and joyous new year for the Talwars! To be informed that the little line of hope that they had been clinging on to had disappeared – to be told that they must now forget that they had a daughter who was killed while sleeping in her own bed – to be reminded that they had failed to protect their own child and paid for it in the harshest way possible – these are the gifts with which they ring in the new year.