The Indian Supreme Court has said that corruption was a human-rights issue. Interpreting corruption as a human rights matter is a fantastic idea.
Being corrupt is a human wrong. When a public official is corrupt, he steals from the public exchequer and denies a genuine good to somebody. What should be another’s becomes his. He owns what he is not supposed to own thereby denying a deserving person something that the latter is genuinely entitled to.
Humans have been corrupt from time immemorial. Probably Judas was the first one to be corrupt. Judas didn’t hold public office but Jeyalalitha did. She was the head of an Indian state of 60 million people. And she betrayed their trust.
She conducted a lavish wedding for her foster son and paid for the expenses from her ill-gotten money. So, somebody in the country was deprived of his money because Jeyalalitha stole his money to conduct the wedding. Probably many under-privileged girls didn’t get married because their fathers were not able to afford the wedding expenses. Jeyalalitha stole from their father’s due.
The human-right of the under-privileged girl to get married had been usurped by Jeyalalitha due to her corruption. Jeya’s wrong deprived the girl of her marriage.
It was only apt that Justice Chandrasekara denied bail to Jeyalalitha quoting this Supreme Court ruling.
Jeyalalitha was corrupt and hence tried and thereby has been convicted. A convict needs to undergo the sentence. ‘Presumed innocent until proven guilty’ is not applicable to her as she has already been proved guilty. She is entitled to appeal to higher courts, no doubt. But then comes the Supreme Court ruling that corruption is anti-human rights and results in economic imbalance and hence she is being detained while being allowed to appeal to the higher courts.
Here is the situation. She has been in jail for the last 6 days for a crime she has been proved to have committed. She is anxious to get bail until the higher courts agree to review the judgment.
Let us travel to 2004.
She was the Chief Minister then. She arrested a 70 year old pontiff on ‘serious’ charges, held him in custody for 60 days while denying bail four times. The Supreme Court granted him bail and later, after nine years, the pontiff was cleared of all charges.
During the trial period, the pontiff was vilified covertly and covertly. Every mad-rag magazine ran rancid and acerbic stories on him. All went under the garb of ‘media freedom’.
The pontiff was not convicted. He was forced to remain in prison even before trial began. But now the former Chief Minister has been convicted and is in jail, but wants bail.
People argue that she would not flee from justice and hence could be given bail. How strange that this argument did not apply to the 70 year old diabetic pontiff even before charges were filed against him !
How ironic is this wail for bail !
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