by
Girish Nikam
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On Friday evening, those watching the CNN-IBN were witness to a spectacle, which is not so often witnessed. An angry and obviously upset veteran advocate, Ram Jethmalani was spewing vitriol against the interviewer and the journalistic community in general. The interviewer/anchor’s angst was why the “angry old man” had decided to take up the case on behalf of Manu Sharma, the alleged killer of the lissome late model, Jessica Lal.

Jethmalani, who is known to have lived and thrived by his own rules of the game, more so in politics, however was angrily throwing the code governing the conduct of the lawyers on the anchor and defending his decision. He was so angry at the “stupid” “bullshitting” “ignorant”, “opinionated” media in general and the anchor in particular, that short of stomping off the sets or worse necking the interviewer off the seat, he did everything else.

Why was Jethmalani so angry? Does he have a reason to be so angry? No one has any doubt in this country that the octogenarian senior advocate is one who knows his law. He is known as one of the best criminal lawyers in post-independent India, though he is no chicken in constitutional matters too.

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And if he is getting angry, one cannot ignore it.

The reason behind his anger is the way in which the media has been playing the exposer, the interrogator and the judge. Fresh with the success of sending the Delhi law student late Priyadarshini Mattoo’s killer, Santosh Singh to the gallows last week, the media has acquired further teeth. So when Jethmalani announced last week that he would be defending Manu Sharma, son of Haryana’s former Minister Venod Sharma, in the higher courts, the TV channels went berserk.

Having been found innocent by the lower court, just like Santosh Singh also was initially, Manu Sharma now finds himself in the dock again, as the investigations have been re-launched following the uproar in the media and also by a large number of sympathetic people. There is no doubt now that the Delhi police, just like in the case of the Mattoo girl, had botched up the Jessica Lal death investigations too, thereby allowing Sharma to be acquitted by the lower court.

The question however is should Manu Sharma, whatever may be the public mood created by an activist media, be entitled to the services of the best lawyer he can afford? In fact the bigger question is should a Ram Jethmalani refuse to appear for Manu Sharma just because of the media furore and the “judgment” virtually passed by the media about his culpability.

In fact as Jethmalani rightly pointed out, every person facing a charge is entitled to his defence, and every lawyer’s duty is to appear for his client. The refusal of a lawyer to appear for the accused is as big a crime as the crime itself, according to the veteran lawyer.

However, even some of his dearest admirers and colleagues in the Bar, have expressed disappointment and dismay at Jethmalani’s decision to appear for Manu Sharma. This is because they have all become so involved in the public campaign to bring the model’s killers to book, that they have forgotten their own professional code.

Unfortunately such a tendency is only growing in the recent past across the country. Take the case of Kashmir . Some months’ back, an alleged sex scandal broke out in Srinagar, into which many of the senior police officers, politicians, bureaucrats and even lawyers were snared.

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The fundamentalist elements exploited the situation and women in purdah were seen leading “raids” against the alleged perpetrators and also the women who had allegedly run the sex racket.

When it came to the defence of these senior officers and politicians, the Kashmir Bar was forced, by some fundamentalist elements within it, to pass a resolution not allowing any of its members from appearing for the accused. A gross violation of all the codes and rules of the Bar one can think of. Finally, none other than former Law Minister Arun Jaitley approached the Supreme Court, and sought the case to be shifted to Chandigarh, which he succeeded in, and now he is appearing for the accused.

What Jaitley did was in the best interest of the rule of law and so is what Jethmalani doing. But nowadays these acts can easily be dubbed as anti-social or worse anti-national.

Take the case of the recent arrests of alleged terrorists in Mysore. That Mysore has become the haven of terrorism is certainly a matter of great concern, especially for a Mysorean like me. That the laid back, salubrious town is now witnessing such activities can indeed shake any Mysorean out of his wits. But does one defend the actions of the local Bar Association or at least some who claim to represent it?

On the day of the arrests of those youths, there was this excited, inflammable young man in a black coat fuming to the TV mikes how no one from the Mysore Bar would appear for the arrested youths and how even lawyers from outside will also not be allowed to appear.

Now if these are not instances of terrorism of the Bar, what else is? By behaving in such a fashion, these so-called defenders of justice are only heaping injustice and negating the golden rule of law, that “so far as one is proven guilty, one is presumed innocent”.

However troublesome this tenet of the law maybe, unless a democratic society follows it in spirit, we can easily end up as a lawless state, where might will be proved right.

If we go back some years, the pre-24 hour news channel era, we had some of the most ghastly assassinations, of two Prime Ministers, Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv. But in both cases, the accused persons had the benefit of good lawyers. There was no brouhaha made in those days.

There were no protests on the streets of Chennai, when the LTTE cadres accused of killing Rajiv Gandhi were represented by competent counsels. And in both cases, despite the competent counsels, the accused got stiff sentence, and two of Indira Killers were even hanged. Therefore for anyone to argue that certain accused persons, whatever may the nature of the crime be, should not be represented by lawyers, is going back to medieval age.

As far as the media is concerned, its tendency to jump to conclusions based on the largely police-fed information can cause havoc. But going by the very nature of the media and more so after the 24-hour news channels and its overly-competitive nature, has made a mockery of many of the rules of journalism, we can only hope that better sense will prevail over a period of time.

We should be thankful for the Jethmalanis and his ilk, which refuses to get terrorized either by an over-the-board media or by their own community suffering from a false pride. After all the majesty of law can only be celebrated when it is allowed its full play, not by short-circuiting it.

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06-11-2006