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B. S. Raghavan

"Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law"

— Oliver Goldsmith in The Traveller

THERE are two memorable legacies the former Prime Minister, Mr P. V. Narasimha Rao, has left for the Indian polity. One was the opening of the Indian economy with the able assistance of his Finance Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh. The effects of this, probably beneficial, are still unravelling.

The other is his famous addition to the political vocabulary — The law will take its own course! — to sweeten the sight of politicians and big shots getting enmeshed in criminal cases. Since then, everybody, high and low, naive and knave, has begun parroting this whenever confronted with yet another spectacle of a high profile personage accused of heinous crimes waving "ta-ta" to his henchmen with an ear-to-ear smile and getting into the police van for being lodged in jail. And well he might grin.

By now, a pattern has emerged in the way the law takes its course: There is first the fanfare of an arrest on shocking allegations of murder, mayhem, plundering of hundreds of crores of public funds, amassing of disproportionate assets on a stupendous scale and everything else you never dared to associate with decent, civilised human beings. Then follows the daily trumpeting by the investigative agencies of their unearthing clinching, incriminating evidence, spiced up by the titillating visuals of the arrested accused produced in courts.

Instant verdicts of innocence or guilt are pronounced, not by courts, but by political partisans and pontificating pundits to the utter mystification of the (wo)man-in-the-street. Everything dies down with the same abruptness with which it all began, and an interminable silence follows. Having had a rollicking time, everybody goes home.

Nothing more is heard of the investigations, the charges, or the cases. However, do not expect to be spared from hearing a lot of and from the erstwhile accused since they end up as MPs, MLAs or Ministers smartly saluted by the same police officers who investigated them!

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