By Amisha Bhardwaj:
His neighbors grimace with disgust at his mere memory, a 19 year old girl describes him with the word ‘disgusting’; his employer called him a heavy drinker, negligent and rash driver. The country knows him as the ringleader of the group which proved or rather certified that Delhi indeed is the crime capital of India. Yes! You guessed it right; it is Ram Singh being talked about here, the one who crossed all the ‘maryadaas‘ and happens to be in complete contrast to the values attributed to his name, Ram.
I don’t find any necessity to introduce Nirbhaya and what this late beast with his four other companions did to her last December, I guess that none of us has forgotten the incident. Now keeping ‘the incident’ in your head would you call his suicide, let us take it to be one, wrong? Well, to me it is NOT! Looking at the great judicial system India supports, it’s speed, the fashion in which it functions, where the proven culprits like them get a lawyer to fight in the court, twisting and turning the facts and happen to ‘damage’ the case and call it to be their professional duty to create ‘doubts’ in the court; I think it is better that he headed to hell all by himself, surprising the nation and surprising people like me quite pleasantly.
Mange Ram Singh, his father, calls it a murder by saying that he confessed about his mistake,why would he commit suicide? He was prepared for any punishment the government would have given him. The authorities in New Delhi’s Tihar Jail said that he hanged himself and the post-mortem report confirms it. To me, the only sad part of his demise is that he escaped all the humiliations and trials that he deserved but it is better than the ache I would have felt to see him alive after the trials and the punishment he would have got.
Not forgetting that India is a democracy, the impact his death has on the political front cannot be ignored. The opposition party leaders are ready with their word cannons slamming Congress, Shiela Dixit and the prison authorities at Tihar Jail for their security lapse. Perhaps this case will once again surface the issues of custodial security, custodial deaths and the ‘gangs’ within the prisons, which function much like we see in movies. Although it really is a serious issue and the authorities should tighten the grip over the same but still this ‘rarest of the rare’ case can be excused and for all the humanitarians who are concerned about Ram Singh now and are calling his suicide a murder of human rights, I would like to ask since when human rights are being given to filthy beasts like him? For no human can do what they did to an another human. So please, don’t give your throat the pain, a request.
‘You may find it funny but the way it all has happened it makes me feel like Nirbhaya is back to hunt down her wrong doers like Kareena did it in Talaash’, said one of my friends while we were discussing the topic over coffee. Perhaps she (Nirbhaya) thinks that she has waited too long for the justice now. So, in a nut shell, may it be suicide, a murder planned by the police authorities or his inmates or may it be Nirbhaya hunting them down, to me the justice has been done, to know that he no more breathes the same air as I do makes me feel that the air has got fresher. One down, four more to go and all I am waiting for is to see how they will go!