Hey Ram (Jethmalani)!

For someone who keeps maintaining that he is against media trials of all criminal cases, old, new or pending, one wonders why the veteran lawyer Ram Jethmalani is doing the rounds of TV news channels just to make the point that the judiciary should have the final word and not the Fourth Estate. Surely, it would be simpler for one of India’s most experienced lawyers to stay away from all televised chat shows on what should happen next in all cases, including the one involving former Haryana DGP S P S Rathore. Instead, we have the celebrated lawyer alternatively scowling and glaring at the TV camera while ticking off one news channel after the other for ‘undermining’ the judicial system by holding a media trial and stating that he would not like to be a part of this process! The cases for discussion might vary, the TV news channels might be different, but the one constant is a scowling, glaring Jethmalani registering what P G Wodehouse would have called s d (stout disapproval) at this ‘intolerable intrusion’ by the media into matters it was ‘not qualified’ to comment on and, therefore, best left to the judiciary.

The man on the street — not the one leading to any court! — might wonder why it took 19 years for Rathore to be convicted of molestation. The common man could even quote from Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary where a litigant has been defined as “a person about to give up his skin for the hope of retaining his bones” and litigation as “a machine which you go into as a pig and come out as a sausage”. Bierce defined justice as “a commodity which, in a more or less adulterated condition, the State sells to the citizen as a reward for his allegiance”. However, Bierce was a 19th century journalist and, therefore, going by Jethmalani’s dictum, not competent to comment on judicial matters. Jethmalani would have regarded as not just objectionable but in contempt of court Bierce’s definition of a lawyer as “one skilled in circumvention of the law”!