Is this JUSTICE really JUSTIFIED?

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.