...no crime is rare anymore, life has become cheap, says another
NEWDELHI: As Sabita Ghosh struggled to cope with the court’s decision to commute the death sentence of her daughter’s killers to life in prison, her friend Madhvi Vishwanathan stated that Thursday’s verdict sent a reminder that “no crime is rare anymore”.
Sabita and Madhvi have shared an almost identical journey over the last nine years. Madhvi is the mother of Soumya Vishwanathan, a TV journalist, who was shot dead in south Delhi’s Nelson Mandela Marg in September 2008, around six months before Jigisha Ghosh’s killing.
After arresting Jigisha’s killers, t he Delhi Police had announced that the same three men had killed Soumya too. Later on, the police had gone on to link the trio to the murder of another cab driver, Mohd Nadeem. Robbery had been attributed as the motive in all the three murders.
While the police were able to obtain conviction in Jigisha’s case last year, Soumya’s and Nadeem’s cases are still being argued without a verdict even from the lower court yet.
“The examination of the witnesses has been going on very slowly in Soumya’s case. It is getting very frustrating to visit the court every few weeks. The delay is so much that when the verdict does come, people will not be able to equate it with the crime,” Madhvi told HT.
Madhvi said she was “mentally prepared” to expect a life sentence and not death for the killers in her daughter’s case as well. “Today’s verdict in Jigisha’s case only shows that no crime is rare anymore. Human life has become cheap,” she said.
For the last many years, Madhvi and Sabita have been sharing each other’s pain. “When the high court announced its verdict, Sabita called me up. She was distraught. At least I have a daughter and grandson to help me try to move on in life. Sabita and her husband have no one. They have no hope left in life, nothing to look forward to. They have been unable to move on in life,” said Madhvi.
She said that of all the three cases, Jigisha’s was the strongest with hard evidence in the form of CCTV footage. “In such a watertight case, in which there was no doubt, there should have been no delay. Jigisha’s parents shouldn’t have been made to suffer for nine years,” Madhvi said .