Opinion Punish the guilty

There is a strange parallel between public life in the UK and in India. There has been a series of scandals in both countries where the most respected institutions are in the dock. The British Press,especially the newspapers,have been accused of phone hacking. Murdoch had to close his most popular Sunday tabloid,News of the World,and several of his top staff have been brought before the law for hacking. He has been sued by the victims of hacking. The Leveson Inquiry is examining the issue of privacy and press freedom. The Prime Minister and members of the Cabinet have been made to give evidence,including all their emails. The Press secretary to the PM is now facing jail. Along the way,the Metropolitan Police—Scotland Yard as Sherlock Holmes fans know it—is also a subject of inquiry. Members of Parliament were done over by the Press for expenses fiddling and some have gone to jail. Yet there is no sense of breakdown. The law will take its course. The important signal is that no one is immune from the reach of the law or can hide from public scrutiny.

In London,we are having one of those national nervous breakdowns because of a sex scandal concerning an iconic TV and radio personality Sir Jimmy Savile. He was famous for his charity works,loved by the masses,somewhat equivalent of a swami or a guru in India. He fronted a popular programme called ‘Jim’ll Fix It’,which solved the problems of ordinary people. He raised money for charity,especially for the mentally challenged and the sick. He was knighted and when he died last year,there was a national sense of loss.

Now it turns out that he was a paedophile of an especially nasty sort. He used the young girl patients of hospitals and correctional institutions where he was welcomed as a man raising funds for the institutions and was given free access to inmates. The BBC,where he worked all his career,is in the dock for having overruled an investigation by one of its flagship programmes,‘Newsnight’,last year as it would disrupt the Christmas TV tribute to him. It is all coming out in the open and now there is a serious soul searching about the failures to enforce the law when the man was still alive. Of course,there are rumours of an organised gang of men predating on vulnerable thirteen- and fourteen-year-old girls and they may yet be caught. If they are convicted,they will go to jail. UK is a country where there is rule of law,not the rule of lawyers as in India.

Gandhiji said that Arjun was benighted at the start of the Mahabharat war because he did not want to kill his Kaurava relatives. Gandhiji himself would have killed his loved ones before his enemies if they had done wrong. But then who cares about that Gandhi?