Dheeraj Kalgutkar

It was year 2002 and that was a fateful night, for the poor homeless chaps sleeping on pavements and also to a superstar who was about to drove his SUV over them. That SUV whose driver has changed in police records from drunken Salman Khan to not-drunken Salman Khan to no Salman Khan now. But the poor who died and four others who were injured have remained same, until now. A lower court pronounced the Khan guilty while High Court with same pieces of evidence lower court referred to has acquitted him of all eight charges. So to say evidence decides the justice will be a grave mistake. Court said, he can’t be convicted on the basis of circumstantial evidence yet the same courts have ran whole trial and subsequent judgement based on the same circumstantial evidence in Aarushi Talwar and Hemraj’s double murder. Court observed how public opinion can’t be a case for court verdicts yet in the case of Aarushi a whole theatric...

An Indian court has sentenced Bollywood star Salman Khan to five years in jail for killing a homeless man in a 2002 hit-and-run driving incident in Mumbai. The actor is one of Bollywood’s biggest stars, appearing in more than 80 Hindi-language films. Several of his films, including Dabangg, Ready, Bodyguard, Ek Tha Tiger, Maine Pyar Kiya and Hum Aap Ke Hain Kaun, have been huge commercial hits. That’s short of his bio to make one grasp the magnanimity of a hit-and-run case which took life of one poor homeless and injured the others who were sleeping on pavements. The case could have got over in few months or a year had it been the poor responsible for killing of the elite but because it is the other way around it took 13 years to call it an end! But that’s not all — the elite are now in open revealing their dark inside, the shameless callousness of shaming the victim and playing innocent of a criminal. You know what is shamelessness? We understand when...