The Big Story: Oh deer

A full 20 years after Salman Khan was accused of hunting an endangered blackbuck in Rajasthan, a court concluded that the actor was indeed guilty of the offence. It sentenced him to five years in prison along with a Rs 10,000 fine. Khan was taken into custody on Thursday. Though many expect him to appeal to a higher court and get relief, the fact that he will actually spend some time in prison has came as a surprise to many.

This is in part because of the general Indian cynicism about whether the law and order system will actually hold powerful people to account. But it also has much to do with Khan himself, an actor who has been accused in several criminal cases, including one in which he was eventually acquitted: the 2002 hit-and-run case in which his SUV allegedly crashed into people sleeping on a pavement in Mumbai, killing one and injuring four others.

Khan has been able to use his resources to examine every legal option to avoid the law’s wrath in these matters. But even if Khan were not a movie star, the fact that a straightforward Wildlife Act case took two decades to come to a conclusion should be a matter of shame for India’s legal system. Even though Khan may have used his wealth to power a battalion of lawyers, the courts have the power to move cases forward in the appropriate manner.

This is in some ways even more imperative in matters involving prominent people because it dovetails with two cliches of the judicial space: justice delayed is justice denied and justice must not just be done, but be seen to be done. In other words, with Khan, the authorities had the opportunity to act quick and set an example.

Khan’s supporters in the industry and beyond have seized on the delay as a reason for why he should not spend time in prison, insisting that he has been a good person since the crime, making a great deal of money from his movies but also spending a lot of it on charity. This sort of facile response actually seems palatable since there is little public memory of the crime 20 years later.

It is important that the courts as well as the government take a look at matters like this and understand how exactly things went awry. If, as many suspect, this was because of intervention by the lawyers of the accused, it would be useful to see how a court can spot and curtail legal approaches that seek to delay a case. This is important because the actor is likely to put his resources to use at the appellate level. Hopefully, that process will not take another two decades to come to a conclusion.

The Big Scroll

‘Bhai is not guilty’: Dejected fans react to Salman Khan’s conviction in blackbuck poaching case.



Punditry

“The latest move to provide graded autonomy to institutions is designed to curtail the autonomy of academics in these institutions. The catch is that the institutions will have to generate their own funds for many of the freedoms they are being granted. So, they would be subject to the dictates of the market,” writes Arun Kumar in the Indian Express. “To want to usurp such imperious authority – judge, jury, arbitrator, executioner – over what is news and what is fake and hand out summary sanction for what it may deem unacceptable have laid bare what many have long suspected and apprehended — that this dispensation is intrinsically and instinctively informed of being an inviolate project and, consequently, above criticism and averse to it,” writes Sankarshan Thakur in the Telegraph.

“The difference between those reformers and today’s self-appointed guardians of Hinduism is that the former were truly connected to the soil. They – unlike today’s jet-set babas who seek patronage primarily from the high and mighty, and are even given Cabinet Minister status by some state governments – moved and lived amongst ordinary people, with a deep understanding of their material as well as spiritual problems and aspirations,” writes Harish Damodaran in the Indian Express.



Giggle

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