Disproportionate Access

INDIA IS GOVERNED BY the rule of law but everyone knows that this is more true on paper than on the ground. If your mobile phone or car gets stolen, try going to a police station and the only thing you will get in return is the feeling that nothing will be done. And this is for the literate middle class. A poor person has almost no hope of justice if he doesn’t go through rungs finding someone influential or a middleman to get taken seriously. Serious crimes like murder do get more traction but that is because it is no longer one individual’s problem anymore. Worse, assume you are innocent and get accused in a crime, the system becomes a black hole from which you might eventually come out but not before your youth has been spent chasing it.

But where the system works wonderfully is for the creamy layer right at the top. For them, it performs at first-world efficiency. You had evidence of it this week when Ram Rahim Singh Insan, the head of the powerful Dera Sacha Sauda sect, who has been sentenced to life imprison­ment for two rapes and one murder, came out of jail once again, timed to just before the elections in Haryana. He got a parole of 20 days. In August, he had got a furlough of 21 days. In the beginning of the year, he had got a parole of 50 days. Last November, too, he got a three-week furlough and that was the third time he was coming out of jail in 2023. All this is however not unusual. It happens all the time with the wealthy and powerful who end up in jail.

The film star Sanjay Dutt, for instance, when he was serving a sentence for stocking arms provided by the underworld involved in the Mum­bai bomb blasts, also came out repeat­edly, which became subject for media reports and public interest litigations. A former minister from Kerala, the late R Balakrishna Pillai, sentenced to a year in jail for a corruption case, spent most of the time either on parole or in a luxurious hospital room until his sentence was reduced and he walked out. All of this is not illegal either. The law has provisions made in good faith for the humane benefit of prisoners, as it should. The reason it rankles to the larger population is because it always seems to be out of reach from those who cannot afford good lawyers or have access to influential connections to lobby with the state for availing these privileges.

The Ram Rahim Singh furlough is something of a self-goal because it appears so obviously wheedled out by him as an election sop. But what can he offer? He can’t campaign in the open, neither will he be eager to pick a side given that the results are uncer­tain. Meanwhile, the rest of the voters, who are not his followers, feel distaste at the possibility that he has been given a special favour. And the only time they can get back at a system out of their reach is during an election.

crimeGurmeet Ram Rahim SinghIndian judiciarylawparolepolicing