Stated in the abstract, the case simple and outrageous. Let’s call them parties A, B, and C. Parties B and C own land which person A wants to grab. Person A somehow induces person B to disappear from view, and then accuses party C of murdering person B. Then a court convicts three people of party C for the murder of person B and throws them in jail. Fast forward 11 years.

Person B reappears. That fact is brought to the attention of the court. Nothing happens for another year. The three convicted of murder continue to languish in jail for a crime that they evidently could not have committed.

The Supreme Court intervenes and orders the court to do something. The wrongly accused — and convicted — persons are let out on bail. Not freed but let out on bail.

I suppose the court figured that it must be a simple case of resurrection — which is why the original sentencing must stand and the only accommodation required is to let them out on bail.

I struggle to imagine the mentality of the people who sat in judgement in this case. Are they even human? Do they have empathy? Do they have any sense of justice or fairness?

Some judge, I presume, convicted three people for murder without a body. What kind of judge was this? How much money was the judge paid to pass that judgement of murder without a body? Were the police in on it and did they drag some corpse to court?

Why did it take so long — nearly a year — after it was discovered that person B was in fact alive and well for anyone to move the court to release the convicted prisoners?

And finally, why were they released on bail? Isn’t the fact that they are patently innocent of murder and that they had already served 11 years in prison sufficient grounds for an immediate release followed by some kind of compensation?

When I first read about this in the papers recently, I could not believe that this Kafkaesque drama was real. But on further reflection, I realized that this is what happens in the final stages of a society’s collapse. This is indicative of insanity at the level of the collective.

The Greek poet Euripides (484 BCE – 406 BCE) declared “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.”

The Indian legal system is in dire straits. From what I get to hear, it appears that judges are easily bribed. There are millions of cases pending in the courts. Cases go on for decades and sometimes the litigants pass into the great beyond before the cases are concluded.

Why is this so? Why is the legal system in such a state?

This is my conjecture. I stress that I am only guessing and I have no hard evidence to back my claims. I think that Indians generally lack empathy. Empathy allows one to put oneself in the other’s position and realize how the other feels. Empathy tells one that one should not treat another the way one would not want to be treated. Empathy is the basis of the Golden Rule. Empathy is essential for one to have a sense of justice and fairness.

Empathy stops one from gratuitously causing harm to other sentient beings. Because of empathy, one feels outraged at injustice and unfairness. Empathy, more than any other feeling, makes us truly human.

Empathy drove Abraham Lincoln to declare, “Just as I would not wish to be a slave, so I would not be a master.” When Bertrand Russell wrote, “The mark of a truly civilized human being is the ability to read a column of numbers and then weep,” he was pointing to the ability to empathize with others in their misfortune.

All those who wrongly convicted those three in the present case clearly lack empathy. They lack a sense of fairness and justice. If the society is not outraged, it can only be because it does not care about justice and fairness.

A society which values justice and fairness would not tolerate judges of the kind that condemn innocent people. In fact, it would not tolerate a government which is so incompetent that the courts don’t actually function.

There are many indicators of India’s backwardness: lousy infrastructure, third rate educational system, dishonest public servants, poor governance, outdated laws, overcrowded cities, . . . the list goes on. But one of the worst is the legal system which in a sense incorporates within itself all of the above maladies.

There are not enough judges, not enough court rooms, the whole system is massively corrupt, the laws are archaic and senseless, . . . and so on.

I wonder what went wrong. The Indian civilization is thousands of years old. Its people have figured out answers to some of the deepest problems of existence. It used to be culturally and materially rich. It gave the world some of the most exalted philosophical ideas and ideals. What went wrong?

Why don’t Indians fight injustice and unfairness? Who brainwashed Indians that it is ok to tolerate the intolerable? Who is responsible for Indians becoming a bunch of unthinking sheep? Who taught them to tolerate injustice?

Here’s what happened after Gandhi’s “Dandi March” in the event called the “Dharasana Satyagraha” in May 1930. The following is a quote from a report filed by an American journalist Webb Miller:

Not one of the marchers even raised an arm to fend off the blows. They went down like ten-pins. From where I stood I heard the sickening whacks of the clubs on unprotected skulls. The waiting crowd of watchers groaned and sucked in their breaths in sympathetic pain at every blow.

Those struck down fell sprawling, unconscious or writhing in pain with fractured skulls or broken shoulders. In two or three minutes the ground was quilted with bodies. Great patches of blood widened on their white clothes. The survivors without breaking ranks silently and doggedly marched on until struck down. When every one of the first column was knocked down stretcher bearers rushed up unmolested by the police and carried off the injured to a thatched hut which had been arranged as a temporary hospital.

There were not enough stretcher-bearers to carry off the wounded; I saw eighteen injured being carried off simultaneously, while forty-two still lay bleeding on the ground awaiting stretcher-bearers. The blankets used as stretchers were sodden with blood.

At times the spectacle of unresisting men being methodically bashed into a bloody pulp sickened me so much I had to turn away. . .I felt an indefinable sense of helpless rage and loathing, almost as much against the men who were submitting unresistingly to being beaten as against the police wielding the clubs. . .

Bodies toppled over in threes and fours, bleeding from great gashes on their scalps. Group after group walked forward, sat down, and submitted to being beaten into insensibility without raising an arm to fend off the blows. Finally the police became enraged by the non-resistance. . . They commenced savagely kicking the seated men in the abdomen and testicles. The injured men writhed and squealed in agony, which seemed to inflame the fury of the police . . . The police then began dragging the sitting men by the arms or feet, sometimes for a hundred yards, and throwing them into ditches. {Emphasis added.}

One should feel “rage and loathing” on witnessing how people acquiesce to violence and thus willingly participate in it. The policemen wielding those steel-tipped lathis were Indians following orders. They did not have the empathy, the sense of justice and fairness, to resist evil. The satyagrahis did not have sense to say no to violence.

They were complicit in the brutality. They accepted brutality and in their acceptance they also became capable of brutality. They suffered violence gladly and became capable of inflicting violence gladly.

I am not a “Gandhian.” I will resist violence with every fiber of my being. And just as I would not accept violence, so also I will never initiate violence. I will never be complicit in the crime by enabling another to be violent towards me.

India and Indians need a lot of things. But the two things Indians definitely need are, one, a sense of fairness and justice, and two, a backbone. They have been robbed of them by the idol they worship called Gandhi.

Here endth the rant.

PS: Here’s a news item of Nov 5th about the case of the resurrected man.