Justice delayed is justice denied!

Indian Predator: Murder in a Courtroom (2022)

Documentary; Netflix

Humans thought living in big numbers protected them from the elements, predators and even enemies. Security concerns were taken care of by the individual community itself. It was jungle justice with no higher justice to recourse. Might decided what was right!

As communities coalesced into country-states, the job of security and protection was outsourced to the State. Suddenly there was no reason for the average citizen to hold powerful weapons. The duty to apprehend and punish wrongdoers was outsourced to State-owned agencies. These agencies were supposed to protect all levels of society, the powerful and powerless alike. It looks all nice on paper, but in reality, the mission statements of these agents are mere rhetorics to pacify the vote bank. The minorities and the weak can only cry foul, fill up the newspapers and breaking news segments and spit on the system.

People will bear with the imperfections of the system. Despite its follies, they believe that God and leaders will soon realise their shortcomings to rectify their errors. At a particular point of no return, the bow will break, and there will be no turning back. Justice must be seen to be done. Justice delayed is justice denied.

This must be what happened to Kasturba Nagar's dwellers in Nagpur, Maharashtra. Since 1999, a group of rowdies had been terrorising the inhabitants. They were brazenly beating up people and molesting girls there. Reports to local police did not achieve much. They became bolder. Akku Yadav is the de-facto leader of the pack. After a brawl, he killed one of his friends. Akku was imprisoned but was released after 10 months, bolder and blunter in his attacks on his victims. He terrorised the women, molesting, harassing and even raping them in the open. The people of Nagar were just too frightened to retaliate.

One brave lady, Asha Bhagat, went against Akku only to be stabbed to death. Another young student was almost killed by Akku but was saved by her quick thinking and when all her neighbours came to her rescue. This act empowered them. When Akku was produced in court, all the ladies of the colony planned an ambush on him. On August 13th 2004, over 200 people from Kasturba Nagar made their way to the Nagpur courts. They locked him up in the courthouse, sprinkled chilli powder into his eyes and mutilated every part of his body, including his ears and genitalia.

This took a big dent in the integrity and competence of the policing and justice systems of the country. When people take the law into their own hands, and the State has no control over protecting its own officers, how can it protect the country? The authorities arrested five random ladies for the murder of Akku. This prompted 200 over ladies from the colony to turn up at the local police station, all confessing to murdering Akku. 50 ladies were later arrested, but the justice system's slow wheel took ten long years to acquit them of all crimes.

The action of the members to ambush the court show and kill an accused in broad daylight exposed the impotence of the police and the courts. They could help but charge the authorities of caring less for them because of their depressed class status and perhaps their generally lower castes too. The purists insist that their actions could not be condoned and the State machinery must be respected. Detractors question the relevance of government servants who are only there to serve the upper echelon of society. Somewhere along the way, the Naxalites are accused of instigating the public to create anar
chy.

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Freedom of expression?

The Lady of Heaven (2021)

Directed by Eli King (pseudonym)

When a controversial figure like Sheikh Yasser Al-Habib writes the script of a movie, one can be pretty sure that it will kick up some dirt. Just for the record, Al-Habib, a Kuwaiti Shia cleric, was imprisoned in Kuwait for 35 years when he insulted the companions of the Prophet back in the early 2000s. After obtaining a royal pardon from the Emir of Kuwait, he resided in the UK. He lost his Kuwaiti citizenship in 2004 when he stated in his speeches that the Prophet died not because of an ailment but after being poisoned by His wives! Al-Habib apparently has made a hobby out of insulting Sunnis.

In the UK, he continues his controversial stance and has been accused of being a divisive figure and one-minded in creating a rift between the Shia and Sunni denominations of Islam. As a head of the Shia community, he regularly appears in the media for all the wrong reasons accentuating the Shia-Sunni divide.

This movie is pregnant with so many points that beg to be picked up by detractors as offensive. No one gets away depicting Islamic holy figures in flesh and bones and gets away scot-free; what more if it is the Prophet and his daughter Fatima. The filmmakers got around it by using CGI and light deception for this purpose.

We know that the Shia-Sunni divisions started as early as when the Prophet was on his deathbed. The selection of His successor was the bone of contention. Ali, Fatima's husband, was apparently favoured by the Prophet but His tribe members felt someone from the tribe should continue the Caliphate duties.

That is where things get murky. Both denominations have their own version of what actually transpired at that time. To tell stories of a dark-skinned mob, who eventually became Sunnis, waiting to burn down the house occupied by Ali and Lady Fatima is just too much for the Ummah to stomach.

To further fuel, the anger is the comparison of the ISIS mob in Mosul during the Iraqi invasion of 2014 to the time surrounding the Prophet's succession. The film compares the pioneers of the Sunni sect as one-minded, aggressive and as resolved as the ISIS men in creating mayhem. The narration tends to imply that the first Islamic terrorism started way back in the 7th century! Lady Fatima was its first victim.

The story is told from the perspective of the Shias on the turn of events around the Prophet's death, but it ended up hurting the sentiments on both sides. It equated the Abu Bakr and Umar (Sunnis) to the dark-skinned Arabs, while the Ali and the Shias were fair-skinned, stirring up racial sentiments.

Muslims worldwide have condemned this movie for spreading false information about the religion. Widespread demonstrations in the UK prompted cinema halls to cancel this film's screening, fearing their staff's safety. Morocco, Egypt, Pakistan, Iran and Iraq denounced the flick as blasphemous and banned it in their countries.

It narrates the tale of Lalith, a young Iraqi boy whose mother was killed by ISIS soldiers. He is picked up by an Iraqi soldier. The soldier's mother nurtures him to escape his PTSD by telling him the story of Prophet Mohamad's daughter, Lady Fatima, who sailed through her difficult times with patience and calmness. A mob was outside her house, threatening to burn her house and demanding for her husband, Ali, who was earmarked to continue the Prophet's journey.

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You say you want a revolution

The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020; Netflix)

Everyone wants to live in a utopia. Even the Islamic jihadis, who are hellbent on destroying everything nice, are looking for that heaven on Earth. The human race continually feels dissatisfied with the way things are run and yearns for reforms. 

Firstly, the society starting with the moderates will initiate the move to change. The ruling regime would appear set in their old ways and seem apathetic to the demands of the majority. Like the 'Emperor in his new clothes', they would be pleased in their own echo-chamber. 

People would rise to the demand for their place in the sun. People would win. Sadly, other self-serving radicals will piggyback on the movement. Controlling a large crowd is no easy task. Emotion runs high, and quickly the peaceful demonstration escalates into a violent protest. Even if the moderates managed to change the status quo, the comrades in arms with different ideologies would steamroll their own agendas. The system will become corrupt. Bear in mind there would exist external forces who are one-track minded on collapsing the whole society so that they can infiltrate with their own plans.

There is an eerie similarity between 1968 America and the 2020 USA. 1968 saw an angry America sending his not-so-fortunate sons of the soil for the slaughter in Vietnam at a draft rate of almost up to 35,000/month. Sending young American men as sacrificial lambs in a land 10,000 miles for a mission so bizarre as countering global Communist threat. That would cost LBJ's re-election ambitions, and the Americans wanted to make their dissatisfaction felt. It was a tumultuous year with Martin Luther King Jr and Robert Kennedy, the Democratic hopeful being assassinated. Many civil society group members would congregate outside the Democratic Party Convention in Chicago to express their dissatisfaction in the US involvement in the Vietnam War. 

The Chicago 7: Abbie Hoffman, John Froines, 
Lee Weiner, David Dellinger Rennie Davis, 
 Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin

What started as a peaceful protest quickly escalated to a blood bath when the crowd became rowdy and the police used their might to subdue the mob. With accusations of high handedness by the police and malice intent of protestors, eight civil society group leaders were charged for intending to start a riot. Bobby Searle, the founder of 'The Black Panthers', was initially included in the charge list but later dropped during trial after a blatant disregard for his civil rights.

This movie narrates the drama, and high tension that hung during the trial of the accused (Chicago 7) in a courtroom presided by an old school judge whose standards would raise many eyebrows by today's standards.

Many liberal and left-leaning thinkers assert that the general anxiety of the American is comparable to that of the 1968 generation. With increasing death toll due to Covid, the uncertainties associated with the post-Covid world and the possible imminent loss of world dominance to a Communist country, people are generally angry, in their assessment. This, they say, is the reason for volatility of public as evidenced by Black Lives Matters movements, increasing Islamophobia and hostility to immigrants. Of course, it is not so straight forward. The world has become more complicated since 1968.

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Lynching in the 21st century!

Our world has become one which is ruled by mobs. We thought we had cancelled mob behaviours when we started engaging in intellectual discourses and discarded our weapons for civilised dialogues. We were made to believe so. The muffled undertones of passive-aggressiveness were always there in the background. It never really disappeared. In those days, the dominant ruling forces called it resistance, reformation or revolution. We learnt that numbers matter and recruiting the masses worked best to overthrow a seemingly impregnable and cruel regime. Most new religions came about through these ways - show the unthinking inebriated public the virtues and purpose of existence, riled their emotions to unite them against a particular cause, sometimes a self-serving one. The major Abrahamic religions began thus, creating a sense of fear, perpetually assuming that they would be besieged.

Fast forward to the present time. We thought that in modern times, with the ease of information at our disposal, we felt that we would be widespread in the depth of our knowledge and be empowered to choose what is best for us. We were never so wrong.

The law of the jungle and the Neanderthal code of ethics, if there ever was, is the law that prevails in cyberspace. The loudest, the most devious and the most insincere, wins the arguments hands down. Anyone who does not conform to the voice of the majority is mercilessly crucified. The 'voice of the majority' is not actually the plea of the most, but narratives of ringmasters of who are paid tools of their puppetmasters with vested interests. If in the medieval times, muscle power, blood and gore put the weak statehood in submission, modern-day cyber warriors do the same through cyberbullying, mass hypnotism and peddling of fake news. Oft-repeated nonsense gains credibility via mere repetition without giving opportunity for critical assessment. Anyone who even utters whispers of differing viewpoint is instantaneously shot down through cybertrooping activities, public shaming and cancel culture. Lynch mobs on social media are out for blood to sow communal hatred, assault on scientific knowledge and insult to our thinking faculty.

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