A right to commit crime.

Chairperson and Managing Director of United Bank of India, Archana Bhargava has opted for early retirement, citing health reasons, after only 10 months in her post. She had made a lot of enemies at the bank for revealing that the bank was hiding Non Performing Assets, or bad loans, amounting to 10.8% of total loans. For years the bank has not been reporting small unpaid loans of less than Rs 1 million each which amounted to Rs 23 billion out of total NPAs of Rs 85.46 billion. If this was a private bank the shareholders would have demanded that the guilty be punished but this being a public sector bank her resignation was quickly accepted, apparently because she had made a lot of enemies at the bank. For sure. No criminal wants to be found out. We do not know how many local politicians and business people have defrauded the bank but there is no doubt that the government will quietly recapitalise the bank with taxpayer money. Seems that the entire establishment in India, including our judges, are sympathetic towards criminals and not the victims. About a week back the Supreme Court commuted the death sentence on 3 men convicted in the murder of former Prime Minister, Rajiv Gandhi. Apparently it was because the men had spent 11 years in prison waiting for a verdict on their mercy petition. " Exorbitant delay in disposal of mercy petitions renders the process of execution of death sentence arbitrary, whimsical and, therefore, unexecutable," said the judges. It is shameful that the Congress did not take a decision on the petitions in the last 10 years while it was in power because it needed the support of the DMK in parliament. It is shameful that the DMK played politics with murder because the accused are Tamils. While some may argue that Mr Gandhi would have known the risk and accepted them for the reward of being Prime Minister we cannot forget that 14 innocent people also died whose only crime was to have gone to listen to the speech. It is shameful that the judges have used 11 years of extra life for the culprits, at taxpayer expense, to pardon them. Our judges have no compassion for Jessica Lal or Mudhumita Shukla, both murdered brutally in their prime, but allow their killers out on parole on compassionate grounds. For the relatives of the dead it must be torture to see the killers enjoying early freedom. It has become a right to commit crimes and our justice system is a joke.