Who’ll bell the crime merchants?

Let’s for a moment assume that Arushi was not Rajesh and Nupur Talwar’s daughter. That the bloodied body found with a slit throat and a blow to her head was your daughter. Now recollect how she was vilified. Does this thought make you uncomfortable?

In May 1991 when Rajiv Gandhi was blown to smithereens, the national newspapers took a concerted decision. They would not print his severed head, two dismembered legs, bits of denim-and-velcro belt, pieces of flesh strewn around like lumps of clay in a macabre film set. The crime scene remained redacted from the viewer.

We protected the former PM. But we spent no time in undressing a 14-year-old before the nation and insinuate sexual activity with a man thrice her age – without a single evidence to nail the truth. What does it mean when reason and ethics that guided one action in 1991 was discarded in 2008? Could it be that testosterone-driven media smelled the murder of a pubescent girl as a fair game to feast on? Some would argue it could have been arbitrary.

But was it? Immediately after the murder, television ratings skyrocketed, it was no secret that studios were milking the case for all that it was worth. A study by the Centre for Media Studies (CMS) in 2008 said six channels beamed news and special programmes on the “Noida twin murder” for 39.30 hours out of a total of 92 hours of prime time from 7 pm to 11 pm between May 16 and June 7, 2008. The channels DD News, Zee News, Aaj Tak, Star News, NDTV 24X7 and CNNIBN telecast 234 news reports and 62 special programmes during the period. That’s 43% of prime time over 23 days.

Sevanti Ninan, the editor of the Indian media monitoring website the Hoot.org, at the time called the channels “crime merchants”. She noted how Times Now picked on Arushi’s call records revealing numbers of who she called when. Aaj Tak showed two presenters going around flat, which included a model lying on the bed in “Arushi’s room”. How Headlines Today reconstructed the case using music and taglines like “Love Destroyed”. Selling crime, she surmised, is the route to widening consumer base for news. Crime was used as a norm by Hindi newspapers catering to first time subscribers and trying to create readers in places where there were none. And now it was being done by TV stations that were out enlist new viewers.

Arbitrariness is the foundation of the universe. But the vicious act of mutilating the memory of Arushi by the “crime merchants” was a collective act of depravity. The irony of demanding death in December 16 Nirbhaya rape case, as many TV news channels did eight years later, spins the top on its head. In the first the media was the perpetrator, in the latter, a group of vile men. One doesn’t see any difference between the two. Oh, forgive me, the first did it to increase revenue, the latter, short term pleasure.

In 2008 the Supreme Court three-judge bench comprising Justices BN Agrawal, VS Sirpurkar and GS Singhvi, in an unrelated case, could not stop to comment that media had acted as “a super-investigating agency causing irreparable damage to the Talwars.” But no one paid heed.

In 2009, a year after Arushi’s death, I interviewed the Talwars for the People’s magazine cover story. The two were moving around like two scarred rabbits, avoiding the media, keeping to themselves. The interview took place in the burrow of their now defunct Hauz Khas underground dental clinic. Not one journalist had interviewed them for a whole year. Why?

For a while after People magazine hit the stands, the scales of justice were poised mid air. Several journalists thereafter corrected their approach mid-way. They started interrogating both sides. It became a hyphenated story of Hemraj-Arushi. Then the CBI stepped in.

Mistrial of the Talwars has its roots in the fact that forensic evidence was compromised by the inability of the UP police to secure the crime scene and the irresponsibility of the media and hangers on who were responsible for its obliteration in the first place.

It all boiled down to circumstantial evidence. It was up to the CBI to provide clear, unambiguous and irrefutable evidence. They could neither prove the motive, nor prove the murder weapon (khurki, scalpel, golf club or kitchen knife?), nor identify correctly the number people (was it four people or five?) in the house at the time of the murder. Nine years on, in its order, the Allahabad High Court bench of justices Bala Krishna Narain and Arvind Kumar Mishra had harsh words for everyone. For the CBI for mishandling, planting witnesses, cooking up evidence, “Suspicion, however grave it may be, cannot take place of proof,” said the judges adding that CBI failed to prove beyond doubt that Talwars had killed their daughter and the conclusion drawn by the lower court judge was “illegal and vitiated” as it did not consider the evidence on record.

As for the media, to paraphrase Justice Mishra’s rebuke of the lower court judge the following need to be kept in mind: 1) The parochial and narrow approach to facts and evidence should be avoided 2) Passionate and rash reasoning should not be guiding factors; 3) Self perception and realm should not reflect on analogy of the facts and evidence on record; and 4) Crime reports should not be based on self-created postulates (you can speculate on government’s intentions, but you cannot play with an individual’s life, that is a crime).