The Ambani Car And The Immunity For The Privileged



By Vidyadhar Date

04 January, 2014

Countercurrents.org

There has been widespread criticism of the crash in Mumbai last month involving the luxury sports car Aston Martin belonging to the Reliance group, headed by India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani.

The rich usually get away with their murderous driving. In New York last month a court lightly let off a rich kid who was involved in killing four people while driving in a drunken state. Being rich now entitles you to stay out of jail, rightly declared a newspaper headline. The young man and his friends were said to be heavily drunk after stealing beer from a Walmart store. The young man was sentenced to 10 years of probation, no jail. The prosecution had demanded 20 years in prison.

In Brazil a rich young man has got away with two years of community service and suspension of driving licence for two years.A court convicted last year Thor Batista, son of one of the richest men in the world, on the charge of killing a cyclist in a road crash with his luxury car Mercedes . He used to proudly display the car in his drawing room.

And diplomats don’t even have to face prosecution for killing people with rash driving. In Pakistan two U.S. diplomats killed two persons in separate road crashes last year and some of the newspaper reports carry little of the news beyond statements released by the U.S. embassy. That just shows how compromised the media is.

If one considers the proportion of American embassy motorists to the total number of motorists in Islamabad, the killing of two persons by Americans in a few months is a very serious matter indeed . A U.S. diplomat fled Kenya after his car killed a man last year and members of Parliament are demanding that he be brought back and prosecuted..

The American embassy statement on one of the deaths caused by its diplomats in Pakistan shows how the powerful can distort the language and truth. It says the diplomat’s car collided with a pedestrian. This is a clear distortion of facts and is clear from the statement itself. It admits that the accident was terrible and expressed its regret. The point is two vehicles collide, a vehicle does not collide with a harmless pedestrian, it hits, injures, kills him or her. Secondly, the statement calls it an accident. Now, the science of road crash investigation has progressed so much that in the West they have stopped using the word accident . The accepted word now is a crash. Someone is always responsible for the crime on the road. It can’t be just called an accident and the driver given the benefit of doubt. The Indian police too are quick to give the benefit of doubt to arrogant rich motorists for reasons which can be easily imagined. These days the police are quick to give a certificate that the driver was not drunk suggesting that it was an inadvertent accident, the driver was not responsible. The poor victim of road accidents has little chance of getting justice as the rich use their money power. Recently a medical doctor in Mumbai gave a certificate that a man had died of a natural death when in fact he was killed in a road accident. The media laps up the version given by the police and the guilty drivers. Astonishingly, the Times of India’s Mumbai edition carried a front page report on January 4 saying a motorist met with an accident while trying to save a rat on the road. And this was on the Bandra Worli sea link where drivers are notorious for driving at high speeds. And this was in the morning peak hour where there is little chance of spotting a rat unless one is walking along and walking is not allowed on the freeway. The fact is many drivers actually come speeding with a vengeance when they see a pedestrian and thirsting to hit the victim. Sinister . there is no other word for these anti social elements. Journalist and author in Mumbai Naresh Fernandes posted on facebook recently photographs of motor cars parked on the footpath and he rightly called the drivers sociopaths, anti-social elements.



Driving licences have become licences to kill. And this has come from none other than Mahaashtra’s home minister R.R. Patil. There is rampant corruption in giving licences. That has always been the case. The most shameful part is that while the government is gifting away land to vested interests, it has kept little land for the government departments’ most basic needs. So the transport office does not have enough land to conduct driving tests in Mumbai.



Privatisation of road transport has proved to be a disaster, especially in terms of road mishaps. Besides, these luxury vehicles never run on time. But sheer vanity and folly drives many people to take to these unsafe and expensive journeys. State transport buses are far more punctual and have a better safety record, though it is true that an ST bus met with a serious accident in Maharashtra earlier this month in Malshej ghat. This could have been avoided had the authorities listened to the driver who had pleaded that the extra-long bus was unsuitable for the hilly region with many sharp curves and should not be pressed into service. Many private luxury buses have been illegally modified and their seats increased endangering the safety of passengers.

The fact is that the rich and arrogant are playing havoc on our roads. But a concerted effort is made by the car lobby to blame pedestrians. A short film shown by a prominent TV channel during the current safety week showed a pedestrian coming under the wheels of a car allegedly because of his own fault. The f ilm asked pedestrians not to listen to music while walking on the road. This is a gross distortion of reality. There may be a very small minority of such pedestrians but most pedestrians are clearly innocent.

A film made by Dilshad Panday with grateful thanks to the Mumbai traffic police shows a rich, suited booted motorist as very well behaved and kind and he is shown as a victim of careless pedestrians. A pedestrian comes like a guerilla to fall under the wheels of the motorist’s wheels. Such gross distortion. The motorist guides a family to cross the road safely respecting the signal. One would have appreciated the film had it shown even a bit of the monstrous behavior of motorists that is witnessed on roads all the time. Most of the shooting of the film seems to have taken place at Marine Drive in Mumbai. A very inappropriate venue for the film as it is notorious for its hostility to pedestrians.

As for the Ambani car, a lot of eyebrows have been over the statement issued by Reliance, the identity of the driver who crashed into two other luxury cars and damaged them severely. The owners of the two cars have miraculously got brand new cars and one can imagine how this could have happened.

(Vidyadhar Date is a senior journalist and author of the book Traffic in the era of climate change)



