Delhi cops stumble upon convenience

So they say Soumya Vishwanathan’s killers have finally been caught – and a motive established. The killers in another case (Jigisha Ghosh’s murder) were caught, and the cops soon stumbled upon the fact that the same people were involved in Soumya Vishwanathan’s murder as well. (Am I the only one this sounds suspicious to?)

However, the police claim that the motive behind Soumya Vishwanathan’s bizarre murder on Delhi’s Nelson Mandela Road at 3.30 am one night, was simply road rage. It seems that because Soumya overtook the ruffians’ car, they put a bullet through her brain.
Now while this may not be the most bizarre thing you’ve heard happen in Delhi – the capital is, after all, the most violent city in India – this doesn’t sound right to me.

To refresh memories, let me recap the case quickly. Soumya Vishwanathan, a young journalist with Headlines Today was returning home one September night last year, when the incident occurred. The cops that reached the scene that night say it looked like an accident in the beginning; with the car rammed straight into the divider. Until, that is, they discovered the bullet lodged in Soumya’s head. Strangely, none of Soumya’s possessions were stolen, and the haunting image of one golden kolhapuri chappal by the pedals of the car became the image synonymous with the shocking murder.
Though the matter escalated, with hundreds of journalists protesting in different ways, the police was making no headway in finding the guilty party, or a motive for the killing. Until recently.

While investigating Jigisha Ghosh’s murder (the young Hewitt employee who was abducted and killed a week ago), the police “stumbled upon” evidence that linked the same killers to both the cases. While in Jigisha’s case, the motive was theft, Soumya seems to have paid the price of someone’s rage with her life.

However, this all sounds a bit shady to me. Isn’t it just too convenient that a pending case was neatly wrapped up with an ongoing one? That a bunch of boys are roaming the streets of Delhi, randomly killing young girls for different reasons each time? That having their car overtaken got them so mad that they speeded up till they were carefully alligned beside the moving car, aimed for her head, and shot the young woman driver? That they could even aim, while both cars were moving at such high speeds?

The loopholes in the facts of this case have me pointing a finger at the incompetent police force yet again. Are they hiding behind yet another smokescreen, covering up their inefficiency? Is this another Ansal Plaza/ Batla House? I wish I knew.

Does the fact that I knew Soumya when we were both little girls influence how strongly I feel about this case? Probably. And I don’t want the men who killed her to go scot-free just because the police found it easier to target someone whose neck was already in the noose. And I certainly don’t want another young woman to be found with a mysterious bullet in her skull before we realise that.

In my impotency of being a mere citizen, I can only hope the cops have got the right guys – that Soumya’s death will be avenged.

Stories and their memories

Last week I was writing an article on Hemant Karkare and his family, which required multiple trips to his house in Dadar, where his wife still stays.
As important as the story are the pictures that you run with it, for which I found myself trekking to the house again, hoping to persuade Mrs. Karkare to lend me some photographs to use with the story.

I didn’t think it would be too hard- after all, most people want their pictures in the news, right? However, as we sat on her brown sofa, with old faded photographs littered on the coffee table in front of us, Mrs Karkare was terribly hesitant about letting the photographs out of her sight. While I tried to make her feel comfortable by letting her choose the pictures she wouldn’t mind us using on our website, she kept asking me, “When will you give them back?”

I told her I just needed to scan them, and would return them immediately, but she seemed reluctant to let them out of her sight. “All you press-waalas come and ask for photos, and then you don’t return them!” she said, throwing me an accusatory look. I was taken aback- at the caustic tone, as well as these journalists that the poor woman had encountered.

For what kind of person takes a widow’s only memories and then refuses to return them? What kind of journalism is that, where you forget that your stories are about real live people, and their tragedies? People who you might be hurting when you’re too lazy to return the one thing they have left - their memories?