Making the Law ‘Take its Own Course’
- Jyoti Punwani
- Nov 22, 2022
- 20 min read
Updated: Mar 12
Does the law take its own course or is it made to take a certain course? Property cases are notorious for taking forever, but when the crime is murder, i.e., when the state is the prosecutor, and the facts of the case have been ascertained by the most reliable authorities, can justice elude the victim’s families for as long as two or three decades? Or is it made to do so?
These questions arise from the way two cases—which should have been front page news but have simply disappeared from the public consciousness—have developed.
I. When protectors become predators
On 9 January 1993, when Mumbai was in the grip of the second wave of communal riots sparked off by the demolition of the Babri Masjid[1], eight Muslims were shot dead by the police inside the Suleman Usman Bakery and the adjacent madrasa (an Islamic school) in the city’s old Muslim quarter.
The trial of those policemen is still on—over 29 years later.
If there was ever a case that can be described as an ‘orphan’, this is it. Nobody is interested in it. Those most affected by the incident—the victims’ families—are either unaware of or indifferent to the legal proceedings. The whereabouts of only one of the eight affected families is known: Abdullah Qasim, the son of one of the victims, is now a middle-aged school teacher with a family in Mumbai. The fire within, that propelled him as a 20-year-old to intervene in the initial stages of the case, is seemingly gone. Believing that the killers of his father will never be punished, his involvement is limited to appearing in court when summoned as a witness. He has already done so five times in the space of a year, taking leave from work each time—but every time, his turn to depose hasn’t come.
For the Public Prosecutors (PPs) that have handled the case through the years, the tattered, yellowing files present an unpleasant, thankless duty; for the defence, the longer it is delayed, the lower the chances of their clients being brought to book. And for judges, the fact that the case is still pending, almost three decades after the incident at its centre, remains an enigma.
‘Kasla case ahey? (What’s this case about?)’. This question, asked with irritation by every new judge (the case record shows it’s meandered through at least 11 courts and 13 judges so far), is like a stab through the heart. If only they knew the words used by a sitting High Court judge to describe the incident! ‘The police behaved in a manner not becoming of a police force of a civilised, democratic state’, concluded Justice B N Srikrishna, heading the one-man judicial commission of inquiry into Mumbai’s post-Babri Masjid demolition riots of December 1992 and January 1993.[2]
