UP Chief Minister Mulayam Singh Yadav's brother and State PWD Minister Shivpal Singh Yadav who visited Noida to look into the Nithari episode in which several slum children were raped and killed, said these killings were 'small and routine'.

Almost all newspapers agreed that this would go down in history as the most insensitive statement of the decade. But I consider it is the boldest and a sincere statement applicable to the whole of Uttar Pradesh and most of the country. Accentuated by the fact that the Assembly elections are round the corner, all political parties played the most sensitive tune while expressing their version of the ghoulish episode.

In rural India, and even in semi-urban areas, police stations are practically beyond the poor man's reach. Hence, heinous crimes like murder, rape, kidnapping, robbery, burglary often get a boost.

In the last phase of non-governance in Bihar, villagers would not go to a police station for filing an FIR even in a murder case, simply because they had lost faith in the system. Most Nithari victims were Bihari and Bengali slum dwellers and the police treated them badly.

The cost of life of poor children is nothing, as per the ruling party's dispensation. That is why Shivpal Singh Yadav described the Nithari killings as routine. For him such cases, though true, are routine. If some people call this insensitive they are free to do so. An experienced IPS officer and former Director General of Police Prakash Singh, too, has admitted that the police department has systematically become more and more insensitive.

Media, in its competitiveness for higher circulation and TRPs, has become quite sensitive and has started playing the activist. In cases like the Jessica Lall or Priyadarshini Mattoo gruesome murders, the victims ultimately got justice due to media support.

But what happens in the tens of thousands of other cases? The police and criminals help each other in conspiring to derail the administration of justice. They did succeed even in Mattoo and Lall cases. But as they belonged to the elite class, they got instant support from the media. India is governed by over 15,000 police stations, that too manned by a poor quality constabulary.

Under the impact of politicisation of police and criminalisation of politics, poorer sections of the society are the biggest losers whose cries go unheard.

Exceptions apart, I think the Nithari carnage is the first of its type where the media reacted strongly, though not instantly. The children's cries first caught the imagination of Usha Thakur, who happens to be the grand daughter of national poet Ramdhari Singh Dinkar. She raised her voice against the kidnappings of Nithari children as early as in August 2005.

And in her campaign, she got help not from the English media but from the Hindi daily Dainik Jagaran. She was rebuked and derided by Noida police but that is another story.

The media, too, attended to the incident only after 15 skeletons of the children were found in a nallah behind the house of well connected, influential and wealthy businessman Moninder Singh Pandher.

We pride ourselves as the largest democracy of the world. It is true also, but only in the sense of its size and for the fact that if people so want they can change the Government in elections through ballot.

But, so far as the quality of democracy is concerned and measured, India lacks on many counts.

First, it lacks the rule of law which is the bedrock of all liberties. Second, it is bound by the un-amendable basic structure of our Constitution. Now it has been amply proven that Indian policing is not only dysfunctional but has nexus with criminal gangs. More than that, a section of the police itself is criminal.

The rot is deep because of an insufficient judiciary and bad governance. The slow and tardy process of justice compounds degeneration of constitutional value system.

Criminal law jurisprudence is in a worse shape. No wonder then that the crime graph is rising alarmingly year after year.

Even in a situation like Nithari, Mulayam Singh adopted a foolhardy attitude and, for a long time, stonewalled the demand for a CBI enquiry into the episode till he realised that continuous bad publicity would harm his party's poll prospects.

Still, there is some credibility left to the CBI, despite the fact that many a time the agency has landed itself in the docks and has been castigated by the judiciary.

Let us hope that in the case of Nithari episode, the people's expectations are not belied and the probe is completed within a reasonable time limit.

Courtesy: www.dailypioneer.com, January 14, 2007