Official – Government of India

Sir, your story is a bit like this one. Listen to me carefully. Imagine you and your son are going somewhere on a scooter. You stop at the railway crossing. Zillions of cars and scooters are waiting for the train to pass by. No one has any idea about a huge vulture flying high up in the skies, right above you. In the vulture’s beak, there is a snake. Suddenly, it slithers and manages to free itself; the snake falls down, and finally lands on your son, sitting behind you on your scooter. The snake bites his neck. Your son dies that very instant. And that very instant, the vulture lands, collects the snake and flies away. See, it is no one’s fault. Do you think it is somebody’s fault? Not really. This is exactly what happened to your family. It is no one’s fault.

Judge Misra responding to a grieving father, who had described the brutal murder of his son.  Misra Commission of Inquiry, 1987

Modern states do not allow small men like Jagdish Tytler, Dharam Dass Shastri and Sajjan Kumar to unleash – as part of some sort of private initiative – murder on a genocidal scale. Modern states do not allow their police system to fall apart, except by design. Modern states do not allow Army commanders to say they do not have enough troops to do the job at hand. Littered through Mr Justice Nanavati’s text are all the tell-tale dots of official guilt but these have been left unconnected, allowing the institutional rot to remain and infect our body politic once again.

Siddharth Varadarajan, ‘Moral Indifference as the Form of Modern Evil’, The Hindu, 12 August 2005

The case against former MP, Sajjan Kumar.

State Through Cbi vs Sajjan Kumar & Ors – paragraph 368 (xi).
Justice S. Muralidhar and Justice Vinod Goel. Delhi High Court, 17 December 2018.

“The large scale rioting, mob violence, arson, plunder, genocide and looting has been duly proved and established.”

Shambir & Ors vs State – paragraph 101.
Honourable Mr Justice R. K. Gauba. Delhi High Court, 28 November 2018.