A case celebre

I write this on the eve of the Aarushi and Hemraj murder trial. Like most of urban middle-class India, I am going to be watching with a sense of horror and dread. The thing about this case is that whatever the outcome, it’s a lose-lose situation. Social commentators and many in the media have tried to draw parallels between this case and the Jessica Lal and Nitish Kataria cases, where the media and the middle-class rallied around the family of the murdered victim. The question being asked is: why have people not shown the same sympathy/compassion/outrage in this case? Why have the parents of a 14-year-old girl not been afforded the same support and activism?

The answer is because in the Aarushi case, unlike the Lal and Kataria cases, the villains are a moving target. They are not someone drawn from some lumpen section of India’s sleazy political class, but could be candidates from one of three of the middle class’s most cherished support structures: parents, servants, and law-enforcers.

Think about it. At the end of this trial, what people are dreading is: Aarushi was done in by her parents for a reason as yet too horrific to imagine; or she was murdered by what ought to have been loyal staff; or the villains of the piece were the law-enforcers who, for four years, have added to Nupur and Rajesh Talwar’s unimaginable grief and sorrow by accusing them of a crime they did not commit.

Whichever way you look at it, the Aarushi case plays into a middle-class family’s greatest nightmare: you wake up one morning to the sight of your young child with her throat slit, the family help murdered and that horror is compounded by the fact that you are then accused of committing the murders yourself. And before you know it, you are down a slippery slope in the Indian judicial system.

Or you come home one day and for god knows what heinous reason, you are led to kill your only child and your servant, wash the walls, drag a body to your terrace, clear the place of all traces of evidence and spend the rest of your lives living with that ghastly memory.

I wonder if a spot poll on which outcome the public would prefer to hear in this case will tell us about our own values, fears and mores? Would the Indian middle class prefer to hear that Aarushi’s parents were innocent victims of a horrible witch-hunt and wrongful accusation by the very people who were supposed to protect them? Or that in a highly educated, professional household, one that could easily be yours or mine, parents of a child could, either by pre-meditation or in a fit of unimaginable rage, kill their only daughter?

You see why unlike most other recent cases in India, the Aarushi murder tragedy has riveted, repelled and confounded us and why like the notorious Nanavati case of the sixties, it challenges our accepted norms, ethics and codes of behaviour.

And why, given that there are so many stakeholders in this case, any outcome will hold little promise of closure.

In the West, there have been many cases that have kept their nations in thrall. The OJ Simpson trial in America and the Lindbergh case in England come to mind.

Well, globalisation has brought India its own case célèbre. One can only hope justice will be done!

Malavika Sangghvi is a Mumbai-based writer malavikasangghvi@hotmail.com