Thirteen years!
Well that’s pretty late for any
judicial system to pronounce someone guilty of a crime. But in our country, we
are used to it. In a country of millions, we tend to create plans and delay
them as per our convenience as if it will not affect anyone.
Fir no 326 was filed against
veteran Bollywood actor, Salman Khan, at Bandra Police station after that
unfateful night that saw a pavement dweller dead and other four mercilessly
crushed by a speeding car, allegedly driven by the actor himself under the
influence of alcohol. Since then the government has been very actively, albeit
sluggishly, solving the already solved mystery of this case which was purely a
hit-and-run case.
Putting all the detective plots
to shame, the case took a gruesome thirteen years to reach its fate. These
thirteen years, in which the accused delivered several box-office hits earning
millions of bucks; hosted television shows and even launched a charity
organization which is claimed to save lives of several needy and miserable
souls. Above all this one of the most important thing he did was that he steer
cleared his name from any such offence.
If you log in your social
networks, you will come across several pieces of news items showcasing the
anguish of the people over the verdict that sentenced the actor five years of
imprisonment. Those people who were condemning him thirteen years ago for such horrible
crime are today holding fasts and performing pujas for his sake.
Is there any use of such kind of
punishment? Thirteen years is a hell lot of time for a person to either realize
his fault or to evolve into something bigger of the sorts. In both the
scenarios, the main aim of punishing the person becomes useless.
Though his good deeds in the
recent years can’t make up for what he did back in 2002, the verdict is
supposed to affect the whole society since there are people who believe in self-redemption
and in the power of self-realization. There are people who are moved by the
change in this person’s attitude, whose whole belief system has become a questionable
one by the recent verdict since they believe that punishment is for forbidding
the culprit to repeat his mistakes and change him into a better person, which
the culprit has already done. Because there are people who are unable to decide,
whether to hold him responsible for something he did thirteen years ago, or to
appreciate the ones he did after that.
Is this punishment really worth
it? And if it is, then does taking the life of a person and crushing four under
the wheels account for a meagre punishment of five years? Something surely
needs to change here.
