The boys do not deserve anybody’s sympathy if they were molesting the girls. But till that is proven, they deserve the benefit of doubt. Their future depends on the truth, which only a thorough and unbiased probe can reveal.

Sherlock Holmes once warned us against jumping to facile conclusions: “It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts,” he pontificates in A Scandal in Bohemia.

What would have Sherlock said after watching videos of the two now-famous Rohtak sisters thrashing boys in two different places during the past month?

Could the conversation have gone like this? “I could hardly imagine a more damning case," I (Watson) remarked. "If ever circumstantial evidence pointed to a criminal it does so here."

"Circumstantial evidence is a very tricky thing," answered Holmes thoughtfully. "It may seem to point very straight to one thing, but if you shift your own point of view a little, you may find it pointing in an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different.” (The Boscombe Valley Mystery).

I have taken refuge behind Arthur Conan Doyle’s words because of the perils of being the Devil’s Advocate. When the entire nation has made up its mind on the culpability of the three boys who were belted by the Rohtak sisters on a moving bus, it borders on the insane to even suggest that there are too many holes in this fascinating story.

The problem is, as another cynic Oscar Wilde said, truth is rarely pure and never simple. So, I am going to shift my point of view just by a few degrees.

It could be, for instance, pointed out that the camera starts rolling in the Rohtak bus exactly at the point where the two sisters pull out a belt and pounce on the boy. It is also a convenient coincidence that the two sisters bashed up another boy sitting on a bench in a park almost a month ago and in this case too the cinematographer of the action appears on the scene at the exact moment the two Dabangg girls unleash their fury. Had the shooting begun earlier we could have had the advantage of knowing the context of the fight and the prelude to the action.

The video inside the bus was apparently shot by a pregnant woman, who the two sisters were trying to shield from the accused. The Indian Express points out: There is still no trace of a pregnant woman who allegedly took the video, and who the girls claimed they were speaking up for when the fight broke out.

The nameless, faceless woman hasn’t spoken yet (it is plausible she doesn’t want to reveal her identity) and maybe the cops would soon track her down and what she says would be solid, if not incontrovertible, evidence.

Curiously, an old woman who the accused said they were fighting for has defended the boys. The woman, Nirmala, told TV channels that the boys were not to be blamed and the boys were trying to defend themselves from the sisters who attacked them after an argument over a seat. She could be lying. But wouldn’t Sherlock have said: Motive, Watson, tell me the motive.

So, as Himesh Reshammiya once said in the famous teaser of a forgotten film: “It is complicated.”

The boys do not deserve anybody’s sympathy if they were molesting the girls. But till that is proven, they deserve the benefit of doubt. Their future depends on the truth, which only a thorough and unbiased probe can reveal.

We love to make up our mind on the basis of filmsy evidence. We have often been guilty of substituting fact with emotion and dispensing quick justice in a fit of moral outrage. But we have also been horribly wrong.

Very recently, when two girls were found hanging from a tree in Badaun, most of us were quick to believe they had been raped and killed. But the CBI now claims that the girls had committed suicide. Before that we had almost publicly hung Moninder Pandher for his role in the Nithari killings, a charge that was later found to be baseless by courts. And our flip-flops in the Aarushi Talwar murder case, where we vacillated between sympathy for and indictment of her parents, are legendary.

Everybody can be taken for a ride, put on the rocket by an impatient media. Two years ago, the entire country’s media had hailed a Kerala boy after he was ‘recruited by NASA and admitted simultaneously for a doctoral thesis by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.’ Leading newspapers told us that the young scientist was invited by PM Narendra Modi and told that the country’s door would always be open for him. None of this was true. But the media took two full years to realize this.

Ben Bradlee, a former editor of the Washington Post had once written: “There is a lot of spinning and a lot of lying in our times — in politics, in government, in sports and everywhere. It’s gotten to a point where, if you are like me, you no longer believe the first version of anything.

What would have Sherlock done? He would have, of course, waited for the next version of the Rohtak story.