The Mumbai High Court’s direction to the CBI to register an FIR into allegations of murder and gang rape involving several prominent names is, if sustained by investigation, far more than another judicial development. It is a small but significant restoration of faith – in the possibility that, even in a system crowded with power, influence and manipulation, justice can still find its way through.
For a while, it appeared that the first round had been won by those who knew how to bend the system to their advantage. But the second round seems different. The tables may finally be turning. Those who once appeared invincible are now having to answer questions they had perhaps hoped would disappear with time.
Credit is also due to those who refused to let the matter die – the lawyers, journalists and activists – who kept the spotlight trained on it, relentlessly and often at considerable personal cost. People such as Nilesh Ojha, Ashutosh Pathak and Arnab Goswami ensured that what might otherwise have vanished into the maze of institutional silence remained in the public eye.
But this case disturbs me for a reason that is much closer to home.
I belong to a batch (1988) that produced some extraordinarily distinguished IPS and IAS officers – men and women who served the country with integrity and brought immense pride to their fraternity. Yet the same batch has also had to carry the uncomfortable burden of names publicly associated with serious allegations of corruption and misconduct, including Parambir Singh and Subodh Aggarwal.
What hurts more than the conduct of a few, however, is the silence of the many.
Why did none of us have the courage to call them out?
Why did we hide behind the convenient fiction of civility when what was really required was moral clarity? Why did fraternity become more important than truth? And why were individuals facing grave public questions still spoken of with warmth and affection in the very WhatsApp group of the batch?
There is something deeply unsettling about this.
Institutions do not decay overnight. They decay when good people begin to confuse silence with dignity, neutrality with wisdom, and fraternity with complicity.
Perhaps the real test of a fraternity is not whether it stands together when one of its own is in trouble. It is whether it has the courage to stand apart when one of its own has gone wrong.
And so I am left with an uncomfortable question:
Have we become so compromised that calling a spade a spade is now regarded as foolhardiness – and silence as civility?
If that is where we have arrived, then perhaps the greater failure is not of those who allegedly betrayed their oath.
It is ours – for watching in silence.
By line Uday Sahay ex IPS