Nikhil - Thank you for your note.
To follow up on your reply : my aim was to point out that there was a problem with the ruling. I have been reasonably successful in arguing points of law on various Internet forums. Given that this was a judgement by a Judge of the Supreme Court of India and given that I am not an expert on Indian law, I will consider this a success. I will reply to your further concerns via email to your email id in private. Anand ________________________________ From: Nikhil Mehra <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Fri, January 21, 2011 10:42:39 PM Subject: Re: [silk] a judgment by Supreme Court, India On Sat, Jan 22, 2011 at 9:28 AM, Anand Manikutty <[email protected]> wrote: For Advocates of consociotionalism and multi-culturalism, this judgement may be acceptable, but to me, it is disturbing. This is in regards to case involving the alleged persecution of a tribal woman. My sympathies are with the woman if such an incident indeed happened, but when I tried to learn more about the case, I was a bit disturbed by what I found. The draft of the judgement is on the website and is easy enough to find (please see information below). The concluding words of the judgement were the following: What's truly depressing is that none of these observations were necessary. In fact, what I find more objectionable is that the judgment has not dealt with the evidence against the accused. Instead she's gone on some historical tirade. She recites all that history only to make the point that 92% of India's population consists of immigrants. And that the remaining 8%, particularly the Bhils, have been brutally discriminated against. I don't think she needed to do that because observations such as these are the bases of the various sections of the IPC and that of the SC/ST Atrocities Act is precisely such logic. She only needed to apply the various sections and test the evidence for the proper standard of proof. She's set out the prosecution's case (which is merely their say) but has not discussed the evidence. It isn't so disturbing that she wanted to cite historical sources and certainly not that she wanted to use Eklavya to illuminate her point. Rather it is a matter of legal error and therefore possibly injustice that she has written a judgment convicting a person(s) without reasoning out the evidence.
