Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Dumb charades is for children.

A witness in Salman Khan's case, where he is alleged to have rammed his Land Cruiser against a building in Bandra in September 2002, killing one person and injuring 4 others, turned hostile in court. Why are we not surprised? This is a recurrent happening in India where lawyers keep asking for time and our judges keep obliging, so that witnesses maybe threatened or bribed into silence, making the whole process a mockery. After all, 88 witnesses apparently turned hostile in Varun Gandhi's hate speech case. In December 2008 Bernie Madoff was arrested for running a Ponzi scheme in the US. In June 2009, after just 6 months, he was sentenced to 150 years in prison where he resides at this moment. Ramalinga Raju confessed to falsifying the accounts of his company, Satyam Computer Services to the tune of Rs 71.39 billion in Jan 2009. This was a confession made voluntarily when no one was even aware of the scam. Yet he has been allowed to withdraw his confession and employ a battery of top lawyers to muddy the waters and get him off. Rs 71 billion can buy an awful lot of lawyers. In January 1999 one Sanjeev Nanda killed 6 people, including 2 policemen, when his BMW  failed to stop at a check point. He did not stop to help the injured people, destroyed evidence by getting the car cleaned and his lawyers were heard bribing witnesses. In 2012, after 13 long years, he was rewarded with 2 years community service. It would be so easy to fix. Just pass a law that makes it mandatory to finish all cases in 2 years with no more than 2 extensions allowed to each side. All appeals to be completed in 1 year. Tampering with evidence or witnesses to be punishable by a minimum of 10 years in prison. Politicians are never going to do that are they? Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister, Shivraj Singh Chauhan has been accused of tampering with results of Public Sector Commission exams to get his niece, Ritu appointed as a Deputy Collector even though she did not have the requisite marks. " As RTI applications multiplied, the CM ordered a change in PSC records maintenance period to wipe out the evidence," said Katare of the Congress. His wife is alleged to have interfered with the MP Professional Examination Board. Mr Chauhan is a hero in the BJP for his massive victory in the assembly elections. But why blame the politicians? The Income Tax department has found the daughter and son-in-law of former Chief Justice, KG Balakrishnan guilty of black money transaction.  Justice Balakrishnan has a nice little sinecure as Chairman of the National Human Rights Commission. You scratch my back and I scratch yours. The whole thing is a charade.

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