Letter to BS: Tabrez Ansari case does no credit to criminal justice system

Attempts being made to help those who committed the murder of Tabrez Ansari in cold blood is subversion of justice. Like the Pehlu Khan case, the Ansari case now does no credit to India’s criminal justice system. Something must be terribly wrong if even open-and-shut cases go the way they do without a glimmer of hope for justice to the victims of hate crime. By dropping the murder charges and choosing to slap culpable homicide not amounting to murder, the Jharkhand police has shown utter lack of professionalism and naked partisanship.

The footage of the mob lynching a person clearly establishes the identity of the killers; yet the ruling dispensation has been far too lenient with them. In both the cases of lynching, heart attack was cited as the cause of death. The logic is that the lynching (captured on camera) does not matter because the alleged victims would have been dead anyway due to cardiac arrest. The attribution of heart attacks to stress, drug and injuries is a vain attempt at impartiality. Obfuscation, by mixing up head injuries with heart attack and vice-versa, convinces nobody. The adjectives "light" and "minimal" introduced by the police to describe the brain haemorrhage sustained by Ansari in the mob attack says it all. 

By the prosecution's logic, death must occur on the spot for a crime to be treated as murder. The way the lynching cases are going have underlined the need for a special anti-lynching law. 

G David Milton, Maruthancode

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