Don’t worry, forgive and forget

It has now become an oddly familiar sight. Every few days we see visuals of a prominent and wealthy person being led away by the police or being interrogated for some serious transgression or the other. The latest of course is the young actor, Fardeen Khan, who was arrested last week after being caught in a drug bust. Before him we have had a long list of celebrities being found on the wrong side of the law: Sanjay Dutt, Harshad Mehta, Bharat Shah, Ketan Parikh and Salman Khan for charges as varied as storing arms, defrauding banks, connections with the underworld and hunting protected animals.

Noted music composer Nadeem is still wanted for his suspected role in the murder of T-series owner, Gulshan Kumar. We have also seen
national-level cricketers, including

former captains being raided in connection with allegations of match-fixing. We have seen highly placed political leaders accepting bribes. And we have seen popular actresses like Mamta Kulkarni and Sonali Bendre being dragged to court for posing in clothes that offended religious or moral sentiments. Unfair as it may be to lump the last two names (where the view is at best subjective) with the other offences, the point is that over the last few years we have gotten used to seeing recognisable faces, people that have graced magazine covers for their achievements, in handcuffs or trying to shield their faces from public view on their way to and from the long arm of the law.

What is the public response to this phenomenon? To begin with there is an excitement and a curiosity about the event which is what makes it news in the first place. We do not care so much when a poor or anonymous person is caught for the same offence but we do when someone of means and fame lands up in trouble. And the response can be mixed. There is a bit of shadenfreude perhaps, the malicious enjoyment of someone else’s misfortune; in Harshad Mehta’s case for instance, excited crowds, including a group of doctors, took time off to watch him being presented in court. There could be shock and horror as at the time when the young actor, Puru Rajkumar ran over pavement dwellers in Mumbai. Sanjay Dutt in particular, seemed to have evoked an outpouring of sympathy with his arrest that had everything to do with the actor’s charisma and family and nothing at all with the gravity of his alleged crime: the human element introduced by the fallibility of a star did not for instance, translate into sympathy for others arrested for similar offences. The more recent Fardeen Khan case, on the other hand, looks likely to spark off a discussion on social evils such as the problem of drug addiction among the young.

Perhaps the middle class is caught in a bind — one brilliantly played upon by Tom Wolfe in his novel, Bonfire of the Vanities — which is the need to believe that money and connections can protect one when the moment of retribution is close, and on the other hand, the anger and helplessness about the fact that they possibly can.

Whatever the immediate response though, it does seem that over time the involvement of the rich and famous with crime eventually results in cynicism. There is a perception first of all that people with connections can usually find a way to evade the law. More important is the perception that there is no social cost involved. The idea of arrests, raids and so on do not evoke the same sense of disgrace they once did. Perhaps because they are so much more common. The lines between law-abiding society and crime, such as they were, have blurred.
Not only is there a decreased distinction between wrong and right at the individual level but also at the level of social interaction. Respectability is no longer an issue of any significance. These days consorting with or taking favours from people with unsavoury backgrounds is no longer considered a no-no. The film industry is proof of that as is the ease with which shady figures in the past have managed to endear themselves to the socialite circuit. No questions are asked. Forgive- ness or rather, forgetfulness comes easy. And far from being ostracised, people with serious allegations of wrongdoing are widely welcomed back. There seems to be an odd reluctance to connect the wrong with the wrongdoer. We can blame the law for not handing out its punishments well enough but we seem fairly unable to do the same.

Given the circumstances, celebrities when they are arrested may help us view crime in a more humane light — but the fact should not detract from the seriousness of crime itself.

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