he span of his life, fears call centre executive Jigisha’s 70-year-old father Jagannath Ghosh, may run short of the elusive course of justice that he was promised after his only child was smothered to death six years ago.
Basic, though significant legal procedures such as the submission of evidence linking four men arrested by the Delhi Police for their alleged involvement in his daughter’s murder in early 2009, are stuck midway due to lack of a legal representative at a city court.
That is not all. Terror-triggered complaints of life threats by him and his wife are brushed off as “senile aberrations” by the police of an adjacent town in the NCR that the elderly couple relocated to in the wake of the crime.
“I am already 70, who knows how much longer I will be here; all I can hope and pray for is the deliverance of justice in this lifetime, failing which I don’t expect peace even in the afterlife,” Mr. Ghosh, ironically a retired employee of the Central government, told The Hindu . “Since October 2014, when Rajiv Mohan, who used to be the Public Prosecutor, resigned to be a part of private practice, the case has been stuck on successive hearings and the (Delhi) government has not bothered to take notice, let alone offer any assistance,” he added.
The family contacted The Hindu a day after its report on the re-appointment of Mr. Mohan as a Special Public Prosecutor in the murder of Soumya Viswanathan, a television journalist who was targeted by the same gang accused of murdering their daughter Jigisha.
According to Mr. Ghosh, however, he and his family did not seem to be as fortunate as the Viswanathans despite six-year-old, state-issued assurances of fast-tracking the sentencing of the accused men who, according to investigators who cracked the gruesome case, were among the “most dangerous and deceptive” to prowl the streets of South Delhi during the previous decade.
“It was a case which was full of ups and downs but in which traditional policing did the trick,” recalled HGS Dhaliwal, additional CP, who led the investigation. “Extensive ground work and beat policing needed to be employed unlike any other case in the past; after all, it was a question of the very safety and rule of law that define Delhi as a city,” Mr. Dhaliwal added.
While Mr. Ghosh commended the police for its efficient investigation and swift arrests, he said he was fearful of everything coming to naught due to avoidable technicalities.
“We don’t know what to do; the police don’t even believe us when we complain of getting serial blank calls. The logical conclusion that I foresee is not my daughter’s murderers being punished but being punished for being old and alone by anyone who might just knock and break into our home,” he said.
