A Man Without Subtlety

The job of the public prosecutor isn’t to seek a conviction, as is commonly thought. The public prosecutor is a representative of the State and its people in court. The Indian Law Commission (in its 154th Report on ‘Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973’) in fact calls him or her a ‘minister of justice’. A few days earlier, Ujjwal Nikam, perhaps India’s best known prosecutor who also led the case against Ajmal Kasab, told people on the sidelines of a conference on counterterrorism how he had concocted a lie about Kasab demanding biryani. Amid peals of laughter and large gulps of what could possibly be a plate of biryani, he told them, “Maine media ko chutiya banaya. Not just media. Maine political leaders ko bhi chutiya banaya (I fooled the media; not just the media, political leaders too).”

According to Nikam, during the trial of Ajmal Kasab, a conversation about Raksha Bandhan between Kasab and him on the day of the festival had led to the terrorist wiping his eyes and giving the impression that he was about to cry. The media, he claims, started reporting that Kasab had broken down and was remembering his sister. To counter what he believed was a humane portrayal of Kasab, which he thought could evoke public sympathy, he cooked up a story about how the then terror accused was demanding biryani in prison. Nikam’s lie doesn’t just bring disrepute to the office of the prosecutor, it also places in poor light the court’s trial against Kasab, which the Government wanted to conduct in a fair manner to reveal Pakistan’s complicity in the 26/11 terror attacks. To people at large, Nikam’s lie seemed symptomatic of the country’s tawdry judicial system—how a terrorist was being treated to fancy cuisine several years after his capture.

Nikam is known to be a manipulative law official—ever in search of publicity. A resident of Maharashtra’s Jalgaon district, he has with the help of what many claim his connections in the upper echelons of the state’s political parties been made the prosecutor in a string of high-profile cases. These include the 1993 and 2003 Mumbai bomb blast cases, the murder trials of Gulshan Kumar and Pramod Mahajan, the 2006 Khairlanji massacre, and more recently, the Shakti Mills rape case. For over a decade, he has been living and working in a hotel room in South Mumbai, visiting home only over the weekends. Last year, the Majlis Legal Centre, which supported the two rape victims—a photojournalist and a telephone operator—at Shakti Mills, revealed in a write-up how Nikam had tried to script a drama during the trial. The telephone operator, unlike the photo journalist, was getting less media coverage, so he told her to hit the accused with her footwear in court. ‘He even looked at her footwear and said it is too flimsy,’ the authors of the post wrote, ‘and asked the crime branch to purchase a new pair with a thick sole.’ Unsure of Nikam’s plan, the telephone operator instead asked the judge if she could hit the accused. Nikam still went ahead and told reporters how the victim, overwhelmed with grief, had wanted to hit the accused. During the case, Nikam also told journalists how the photojournalist had broken down and fainted when she was asked to identify the porn clips she was forcibly shown. Flavia Agnes, the head of Majlis, told Mumbai Mirror recently that the photojournalist never fainted. She felt nauseous when asked to identify the porn clip and was ready to complete her deposition only the following day. But Nikam took an adjournment that day and announced that this was because she had fainted.

But he seems to have gone a little too far with this inadvertent boast about Kasab and his biryani. He now has the national reputation of a liar.

But also consider this: what does it say about his opinion of fellow citizens whose sympathies, he believes, would be so easily swayed by a death-row prisoner getting to have a good meal? And if Nikam is right in his assessment, what does this say about us?

Ajmal KasabGulshan KumarMumbai bomb blastPramod Mahajanspecial prosecutorUjjwal Nikam