Rajat Gupta has had his punishment meted out to him by a New York judge. He is lucky to have got away so lightly. He deserved the full tariff of 10 years. His powerful friends urged that being famous and charitable,he should be let off lightly,even sent to Rwanda for social service rather than prison. My view is that the more famous you are the more an example should be made of you to warn other equally famous people that a breach of the law is not a light matter.
In India,he would have not been investigated in the first place and if about to be charged,he could have checked into AIIMS and feigned ill health for many months. If brought before the court,he would have got bail and then nothing would have happened till 10 more years. Judicial delays in India are not accidental. They are a systemic part of the defence of the privileged. That is why there is never likely to be a serious solution of the scandals and scams of the last three years. A Raja and Suresh Kalmadi and Kanimozhi are back in Parliament and sitting on Standing Committees. Long will they rule over innocent Indians.
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 Jimll 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?
