More notes on Nithari

This blog is not a news source, if you want to know the latest on Nithari – click here – Google News is a fairly decent service. The ‘Lynch Mob K’ thinks that there are a lot of kids dead – these two people have all but admitted to killing them, so we should do the right thing and string these two guys up. But, then the ‘Rational K’ kicks in, now this bit of me doesn’t argue against the death penalty – I won’t pander the ‘Liberal Left K’ somewhere in my inner soul (deep down we all have a bit of Liberal Left in all of us) and take up cudgels against the death penalty.
Now, there are a couple of things that are blindingly obvious – things that you’ll never hear or see in the papers. The UP Police have done a spectacularly botched job – and I’m not talking of not taking complaints from migrant labourers. But we aren’t getting into the callous attitude of the UP Police whose money making ability is second only to the Mumbai Police.
Given that my television alternates between Discovery T&L, AXN and Star World (Yes, I live in South Delhi, but I was sensible enough to get DTH two months ago) I end up seeing a lot of CSI. Now, the truth is that investigations even in the Land of the Free don’t happen ‘Crime Scene Investigation’ style. But carrying out bones and bodies in gunny sacks without basic forensic work? I mean, this happened in Uttar Pradesh, our Land of the Free Criminal, so we have no clue if Moninder and Surendra are being made the scapegoats for what one of Mulayam’s henchmen did? I mean Mulayam’s brother considered Nithari ‘small and regular’.
Now what? We are subjecting the two suspects to a technique that has on the whole been fairly discredited in the west – as being against Human Rights. What ‘Narco Analysis’? It would be far more effective to dope these two with a decent hit of LSD and then see them mentally disintegrate when you show them pictures. Hey, I’ve seen people on LSD admit to affairs and worse – if they go into a bad trip, all sorts of little secrets can come tumbling out. But can the testimony hold up in court? I’ve asked criminal three lawyers this and all three of them say that any ‘confession’ from this sort of method (though good enough for the CIA) may not hold up in court (which is why Telgi’s admission of his ‘accomplices’ has never made it to court and might never will).
All that I’ve seen in Nithari is the dark side of our Police Forces and Investigative methodologies (not even an Edit on this, by the way) and the completely tasteless way in which the media operates in such cases. The media themselves are in no small part responsible for the destruction of forensic materials in their haste to get a better ‘picture’ or story and inept UP Policemen didn’t help.
And I haven’t even gotten to the bit where I believe the police across the country assists in the running of child exploitation rackets.