AARUSHI: BEYOND TRUTH

HemRaj Singh

The girl has been alive in the headlines ever since she died. And the more she was discussed and debated, the murkier the picture got. Several theories emerged and almost none was convincing enough. Finally, we got such a heady cocktail of truth and fiction that the very possibility of our waking up to the truth someday was completely obliterated. The situation that emerged is such that every single piece of information disclosed or unearthed will always remain in the shadow of doubt, and we'll always have half-baked versions of relative truths.

We could now have nothing more than mutilated, re-stitched pieces of possible truths sewn together into a body simply because it's not possible to have a vacuum. Unfortunately, the character assassination of little Aarushi is complete and nothing can reverse it.

The question is no longer whether there could be any justice in Aarushi's case. The only question is as to how far the injustice can be undone. Or, worse still, how far could further injustice be prevented, for there is certainly no way we could do any ‘justice' to the little girl.

‘Objectionable' but ‘not compromising'

The most hotly debated statement has been the police's description of the state in which Talwar allegedly found his daughter with the servant – in ‘objectionable' but ‘not compromising' position. Media lapped it up and appeared to mock the description without actually taking it to its logical conclusion. The import of it is clear, subtle and very significant.

There can be hundreds of ‘objectionable' positions given the fact that Aarushi was a young girl and the domestic help a mere servant, but ‘compromising position' has just one meaning. If it was ‘compromising position', Dr. Talwar gets a substantially strong legal defence of temporarily losing self-control on account of ‘grave and sudden provocation'. But the position, police says, was simply ‘objectionable' and insists that it was ‘not compromising', thereby weakening a possible and very foreseeable defence.

For instance, the servant sitting on the same bed with Aarushi and consoling her with her head in his lap can well be ‘objectionable position' to her father but not ‘compromising' by any stretch of imagination. Therefore, the ‘provocation' may be ‘sudden' but is not ‘grave' enough to justify murder.

Noida police, therefore, thought well and started building their case right from the issuance of that statement.

Incompetent police?

Like in all high profile criminal investigations, in this case, too, the police are everybody's favourite whipping boy. And they do deserve the treatment partly. They might not be as useless and as incompetent as they are portrayed. Crime investigation is, after all, no child's play.

Police are not their usual careless selves when it comes to cases washed in glaring media floodlights. On the contrary, they become too careful and just too proactive, which is counterproductive at the end of the day. They are, after all, not used to the kind of attention and focus a case suddenly starts getting for no apparent reason. The investigation is supposed to show some progress everyday, which exerts enormous pressure on the investigators and they start talking. And that's a mistake.

Anyone who has played any part in any crime investigation knows it well that a crime scene is extremely complex. It's like a crossroads with hundreds of ways, one of which leads to the truth about the crime and extends to the culprit. It is by quick elimination based upon what an investigator sees at the crime scene that a few theories regarding the crime are evolved. Many times it is not what the investigator ‘thinks' but ‘feels' at the crime scene that leads to the criminal. This makes a good, well-trained investigator's instincts a dependable tool. Of course, instincts can go wrong, but so can any rational theory based upon hard facts.

A crime scene is bubbling with clues and hundreds of other things that have no connection with the crime. The most daunting challenge is to separate the relevant and the irrelevant. Once that is done, a few theories emerge and each theory is taken to its logical conclusion and then fitted in with the indisputable facts about the case. All the theories that do not go well with other factors, aspects and facts are then discarded. Sometimes, there is more than one piece of puzzle that fits in with the rest of the picture. And the picture with different puzzle pieces looks drastically different. The question now is the picture with which puzzle piece mirrors the truth.

The possibility of the puzzle piece being wrong is always there because it is possible that different parts of several puzzle pieces together reflect the truth but standing alone none of them does despite the fact that they all fit in well with the rest of the picture. So, the picture fitted with any of them is still more or less false. The investigator has to work harder now because he not only has to be sure about the picture himself but must also gather enough evidence to convince the judge or the jury.

That's how hard it can get and I have not even begun scrutinizing the possibility of error in fundamental premises (the rest of picture) themselves.

Therefore, coming up with a watertight case is not exactly a cakewalk. Newspapermen can scrutinize and punch holes in the theories because they are dealing with ‘theories' secondhand. They are looking for loopholes, which will always be there because the facts are being discovered by the day and picture is still evolving.

Possibilities are not facts. When investigators start talking about them, they take the form of ‘claims' and are presented to the people as a police version of the truth. And when this picture changes on evolution of the case, the police are branded incompetent because one of the pictures – or several of them – turned out to be wrong. But who discovered the right picture at the end? Possibly, it was the same investigator or some other who had the opportunity and good fortune to have the results of his predecessor's hard work to his assistance.

Courtroom is the place where theories and versions of truth are put to rigorous test and it is after this test that truth ‘beyond reasonable doubt' emerges. And when it does not, the accused is acquitted, which is as much justice as conviction could be.

Trial by media?

‘Trial by media' is another expression that is as overused as foot wipers at public toilets. Media cannot really escape the blame for blowing issues out of proportion and when it's about high profile crimes, the pen-wielding sleuths work overtime to come up with strange – and sometimes outrageous – admixtures of facts and fiction. However, with all its shortcomings free media is precious and indispensible for responsible governance and the empathetic governed. In Aarushi's case, the media did not have an option but to disclose what it did because it was official police version, no matter how damaging to the reputation of the deceased. Media could not have helped disclosing it without compromising its duty as the principal disseminator of information.

News inspires views and journalists have their own way of looking at what they perceive as truth. It does, at times, cloud their judgment of a news story. Therefore, while one journalist might consider a particular piece of information relevant to the case, the other might discard it as not only irrelevant but also doubtful simply because it does not fit his conception of the chain of events leading to the crime. And though mistakes and errors in judging the newsworthiness of a story are thus possible, these are quite pardonable so long as the scribes work in good faith.

So, media in case of Aarushi can not really be accused of inappropriately handling the reportage by allowing the not-so-clean portrayal of Aarushi's character. Since the little girl was not old enough to have developed a ‘character' and was quite vulnerable to unhealthy influences, it is not proper to point fingers at her. Agreed. But then media did not really indulge in finger-pointing, it simply reported the facts regarding the official claims. And we are still not sure whether or not the police story deserves credence. Truth howsoever unholy and unsavoury has to be told irrespective of the damage it does to anyone unless, of course, it is prohibited by law, or the possible damage far outweighs all the good that the truth could do. But this one is not such a case for sure.