I had raised my voice against hanging of Yakub Memon
Some people thought I am defending terrorism. That is not so. Those who committed the Mumbai bomb blasts and other such dastardly crimes should certainly be hanged. My point, however is : have the real culprits been correctly identified and punished ?
The truth in India is that our police is not trained in scientific investigation, nor does it have the scientific equipment for doing so. So it usually cannot catch the real culprits.
Criminal investigation is a science. If one reads the stories of Sherlock Holmes one sees how Holmes investigates a crime scientifically. He goes to the spot, studies the finger prints, ashes, blood stains, etc and then solves the crime. Similarly, if one sees on Discovery Channel.how the Amercan police solves a crime, by going to the spot and gathering the material like finger prints, blood stains, fibres, etc, and then takes this material to a laboratory where analysis of this material is done with scientific methods e.g. D.N.A. tests, feeding the fingerprints into a national computer network, etc it can often trace out the real criminal. Often from a single fibre ( of a coat or other dress ) found on the spot or in a car it can identify the real culprit.
In India, however, the police is neither trained in scientific investigation, nor does it have the equipment for doing so, and yet it is under pressure to solve the crime. So what does it do in bomb blast or other terrorist acts ? It catches half a dozen persons, often of the minority community ( for Muslims have been demonized as terrorists having nothing to do but throw bombs ), and then fabricates evidence against them. Usually this evidence is ' confessions ' and some ' recoveries ', and this is often accepted by some of our populist judges who want to show they are tough on terror and want to send a message against it. This is what seems to have been done done in the cases of Yakub Memon, Afzal Guru, etc. I have read the judgments of the Courts in these cases carefully and they are based on confessions and recoveries..
Everyone knows how such ' confessions ' are obtained in our country-- by torture. And torture is such a terrible thing that one will confess to everything under torture. Joan of Arc confessed to be a witch under torture. And as regards so called ' recoveries ', usually they are planted by the police.
In this way everybody is happy. The police get off the pressure, and the public is satisfied that the perpetrators have been punished. But is this the way to solve a crime ? The real perpetrators are rarely caught. That is my point.
