TODAY -

Justice : Rallying point one year back : Not anywhere near till now
- Sangai Express Editorial :: April 19, 2013 -



Justice. This was the rallying point for thousands of people one year back. One year down the line and there is nothing to suggest that justice is anywhere near.

Loitam Richard, a BArch student at the Acharya Institute of Architecture, Bangalore, was found dead inside his hostel room under highly questionable circumstances on April 18, 2012.

Significantly, the previous evening, before he was found dead, the late young student was allegedly assaulted by some of his senior mates inside the hostel. The response of the people of Manipur, especially students and professionals staying in other parts of the country, was swift and spontaneous.

Protest demonstrations were held across cities which have a sizeable population of people from the North East and groups to exert pressure to deliver justice were formed in social networking sites, Facebook in particular.

People who had never met each other, much less communicated with each other, suddenly found a rallying point to come together and address issues confronting the people of the North East in other places of the country, especially in the metros.

And why not ? Here was a young, promising student, who suddenly passed away under questionable circumstances with tell tale signs of assault on his physical form.

Dead man tells no tale and it is around this universal truth that attempts were made to create smokescreens to divert the attention of the people from the real issue at hand-Was Richard Loitam murdered, deliberately or otherwise or was it a natural death ?

Fast forward by 12 months and there is nothing to suggest that the answer is near at hand. Death is inevitable.

However when this death is engineered or seems to have been engineered then there is all that more reason to demand a thorough investigation and take things to its logical conclusion.

The death of Richard Loitam is one such case where there is the need to ascertain whether it was engineered or not.

The stoic refusal of the Government of Karnataka to hand the case to a neutral investigating agency like the Central Bureau of Investigation only added to the suspicion of a conspiracy to kill the case.

A special unit of the State police to investigate the case is enough, was the line put forward by the Chief Minister of Karnataka and his men. That this only fuelled the suspicion and the apprehension of the people that the case would be manipulated was there for all to see.

What exactly is the status of the case at the moment ? Has the Government of Manipur been taking up the case with the Karnataka Government or is it under the impression that it has done enough by deputing some of its men there during the height of the tension last year ?

There are reasons not to take Loitam Richard’s death as a blip on the radar. In many ways it is reflective of the vulnerability that the North East people, especially the young ones, face once they cross the ‘chicken neck’.

There is a reason why in many quarters the death of Loitam Richard was seen beyond the death of an individual and it is this which evoked such a massive response from people of all walks of life.

Justice, as understood in the conventional sense in India, takes its time, but the matter of greater import is whether the process which would ensure justice has been put into motion or not.

What the Karnataka Government and India as a whole should study is why the death of Loitam Richard moved beyond the death of an individual and became something of an issue for the people of the North East region.



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