Best Bakery Judgement is a mockery and murder of justice
And the callous killers are Justice Khare (Retd.CJ), Justice Arijit Passayat, Justice DoraiswamyRaju, and judge Abhay Thipsey. They have been aided and abetted by the media, and a whole lot of celebrities like Mahesh Bhatt, Javed Akhtar, and Shabana Aazami who were ever ready to be paraded all around to help the manipulation of the media by the mean and wily woman called Teesta Setalvad, a cold-blooded liar without conscience.
Of two brothers, both accused of identical crimes in the Best Bakery case, one gets life and the other is acquitted. Thipsey has selected the accused to be given the sentences through a lottery system it seems. There was an absolute absence of credible evidence in this case. Thipsey tried to create evidence in the court. He would ask witnesses to go close to the accused and recognize them. Many of them could not. A few did. Who were these witnesses? The same guys who had retracted their statements - given to the police - in a Vadodara fast track court. Zahira was one of them. They had seen the accused day in and day out. Everyone in Vadodara knew the names and faces of the accused. Yet, Thipsey would conduct these bizarre identification parades in his court. He would ask the witnesses to identify the identified. He would almost tutor them to do so. He had to create some evidence so that he could have a semblance of logic, however fake, to pronounce his preordained and predetermined judgement.
Thipsey did not stop at this. He has sent a notice to Zahira and her family, charging them with perjury. What is the fact? Zahira has not changed her testimony before any of the trial court judges. She retracted her statement to the police in the Vadodara court only once. That is called the turning hostile of a prosecution witness. In the Mumbai retrial too, she maintained the same stance. Where is perjury in this case? If there is any perjury committed, it is committed by the witnesses who retracted in Mumbai from what they had testified or not testified to in the Vadodara trial. Is Thipsey going to rely on media footage and the media drama Teesta Setalvad enacted after the Vadodara fast track court verdict to frame Zahira now? Can he do that? Can any sane judge do that?
But can Khare, Arijit Passayat, Raju, and Thipsey be considered sane after the kind of judgements they have delivered? Can we forget Passayat’s dissenting opinion in the Bihar Assembly Dissolution case that clearly demonstrated that he bats for the Congress party? He invented arguments to defend the indefensible. Next, we find the rubber stamp of a PM dismissing the Supreme Court’s indictment of Buta and the UPA government as insufficient to prove any wrongdoing because it was merely a majority judgement.
Retrial of the Best Bakery Case in Mumbai was the biggest fraud played with our criminal justice system. And the final judgement of Thipsey has put our judiciary in the dock since the matter has gone beyond the realm of the media now. A judgement has been delivered that almost ends the productive years of the lives of the accused who have been convicted.
Nine of the accused have been convicted and condemned. They have been dragged through a hell such as no accused in the history of contemporary criminal justice system of India as well as of the rest of the world has had to go through. They had been acquitted by the lower as well as the higher court and yet they were rearrested, retried, and convicted in as dubious, distorted, despicable, and diabolical a manner as could be possible. The fact that it was done at the behest of the Supreme Court of India is the most reprehensible and ignominious aspect of this issue.
Thipsey has been extra-ordinarily harsh with the accused. He has sentenced them to long prison terms for minor offences as well, departing from all past precedents. He could not pronounce a death sentence, as the prosecution did not seek it. However, he has just stopped short of it. He sends them to prison for life. It is not a concurrent jail term for various crimes. When the convict finishes one term, he starts his second. Never before has a judge been so cruel and callous in administering justice in this manner in a case of this nature. How could Thipsey pronounce a judgement like this with such a deadpan conscience in a retrial case that denied the normal privileges, enjoyed even by dreaded criminals, hit men, and terrorists who are tried under sections like 302, to the accused?
This was the objective of this retrial, to manufacture non-existent evidence and hang someone, rightly or wrongly. The noose was ready, Thipsey was asked to pick some poor guys who could be hanged to satisfy blood-thirsty and cold-blooded activists and media personalities like Teesta, Bhatt, and the rest.
Why was it done? Teesta, Khare, Raju, Passayat, and Thipsey are part of a well orchestrated conspiracy. They are after the big fish, probably prompted by their political masters. They have not succeeded so far. But it was unimaginable that Thipsey would cross all limits and perform such an unconscionable and dirty deed for the benefit of the media, and the secularist zealots. One hopes that the High Court undoes the misdeeds of Thipsey, Khare, Raju, and Passayat and saves the honour and name of the judiciary from being permanently sullied.
One also feels that the Supreme Court must intervene and admit that the retrial of the Best Bakery case was a horrendous blunder and decide to annul all proceedings and judgements of the Mumbai retrial as if it never happened. It will mean correcting a grievous error. In fact, the very basis on which the SC ordered the retrial of the case did not exist once Zahira refused to change her testimony she had given in the Vadodara's fast track court.
Look at what is happening in the Jessica Lal murder case. Going by the Best Bakery precedent, this case and thousands of other cases where witnesses are bought over, and forensic evidence is deliberately contaminated and compromised, have all the more and better reasons to be sent for retrial. In the Best Bakery case except the testimony of the contaminated and obviously tutored witnesses no other corroborative evidence was produced, forensic or circumstantial. But the judges of the Supreme Court have opined that the Best Bakery was an exceptional case. Why? Why was it an exceptional case? Is it because the media focussed on it? Is it because it is one of the Gujarat riot cases? What about the cases relating to the Mumbai riots? What about the Mumbai Bomb Blast cases where the accused are roaming free and making billions? It seems that terrorists and anti national elements have the sympathies of all -- the media, the judiciary, the HRCs, and the celebrated activists.Was the Best Bakery case exceptional because the accused came from poor families and had no media clout? Was it an exceptional case because they were Hindus from Gujarat and every Hindu should be killed without a proper trial and on the flimsiest of grounds for having voted Modi back to power?
The media is turning into a propaganda platform for activists who lie and cheat to further their partisan agenda. None seeks the truth. If you are the ‘invisible’ and ‘faceless’ common man, you are doomed forever. A model's or film star's suicide or murder or arrest generates so much of heat and ire. Those who died in the Best Bakery fire were faceless people and so are those innocent commoners who have been condemned for life by judge Thipsey.What is the purpose of a criminal trial? Going by the media's attitude, if the accused are Hindus, they are as good as convicts and thus the trial should necessarily send them to the gallows. If they are Muslims and Christians, they are wrongly implicated. Nobody talks about what is happening to the family members of the Best Bakery accused and convicts. Compare this with the alacrity with which a slain terrorist's family and its woes are highlighted by the media and Human Rights activists. Interviews start appearing from all over, of those who had known the terrorist when he/she was six months old and those who had played carom and hockey with him/her in college.
Teesta was seen accepting congratulatory bouquets and rejoicing over this shameful judgement. Mahesh Bhatt, Javed Akhtar, Shabana Aazami, and Teesta may have a party to celebrate their victory. They know how to stay in the limelight and play politics over dead bodies. They are not faceless people like the majority of Indians. In fact they exist because their faces are all over the TV News channels. They are the only honourable people in the eyes of the media. They proclaim people guilty or not guilty and judges like Thipsey listen to them and write their judgements for these opinionated media bombasts and liars who know how to turn facts into fiction and fiction into facts.
There is yet another first in the history of criminal jurisprudence. Nobody knows as to who is the recipient of justice in the case. It seems that apart from Teesta and her gang of celebrity secularists, none else jumped up in the air with joy over the judgement.Incredible and bizarre but true. The real family of Best Bakery victims is not celebrating Thipsey’s judgement. In fact, they are being accused of shielding the murderers now by the judge. This is how our media driven courts deliver justice these days.
Other related links:-
Why is the Supreme Court being selective in dispensing justice?
The Best Bakery Case returns to haunt the Supreme Court
When the judges of the highest court in the land go bonkers
Muslim body declares Zahira a pariah.
