Home

Follow Countercurrents on Twitter 

Why Subscribe ?

Popularise CC

Join News Letter

Editor's Picks

Press Releases

Action Alert

Feed Burner

Read CC In Your
Own Language

Bradley Manning

India Burning

Mumbai Terror

Financial Crisis

Iraq

AfPak War

Peak Oil

Globalisation

Localism

Alternative Energy

Climate Change

US Imperialism

US Elections

Palestine

Latin America

Communalism

Gender/Feminism

Dalit

Humanrights

Economy

India-pakistan

Kashmir

Environment

Book Review

Gujarat Pogrom

Kandhamal Violence

WSF

Arts/Culture

India Elections

Archives

Links

Submission Policy

About CC

Disclaimer

Fair Use Notice

Contact Us

Search Our Archive

Subscribe To Our
News Letter



Our Site

Web

Name: E-mail:

 

Printer Friendly Version

Satyam’s Raju And Satyam Babu

By Anand Teltumbde

31 December, 2010
Countercurrents.org

Rich and powerful “fraudsters” like Satyam’s Ramalinga Raju will get away; the down and out like Satyam Babu, a poor dalit wrongly convicted for a murder he did not commit, will rot in jail. Caste and – its modern correlate – class matter as never before in India today

With bigger and bigger scams unfolding in rapid succession, peoples’ sensibilities are get­ting blunted even more quickly, further emboldening the potential “scamsters” to commit still larger frauds. Before the hearsay of one scam dies down, another one erupts and overtakes the former. In recent weeks, the Commonwealth Games (CWG) scam has been effectively displaced by the 2G spectrum scam of a mind-bog­gling Rs 1,76,000 crore, making all the scams of the past appear insignificant. The only impact these scams seem to have is to raise the television rating points (TRP) of the news channels and deepen public cynicism about the state of governance in the country. Over the last six decades there have been so many scams but hardly any scam­ster has really been convicted and pun­ished. Every time a scam broke out, people heard that the law would take its own course and saw that course being deflected by pelf and power into nothingness. Indeed, nothing ever happens to the scamsters, fraudsters and criminals in India if they are rich and powerful. While the criminals among politicians, bureaucrats, industri­alists, businessmen, brokers, and specula­tors loot this country with impunity, and continue to enjoy power and prestige, scores of innocent people are incarcerated in jails either for their political beliefs under the repressive laws like the Unlaw­ful Activities (Prevention) Act, the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act, or merely because they are poor and defenceless as scapegoats. A significant percentage of prisoners who spent a number of years in jail do not know what they were there for. They only know the fact that they do not have money to defend themselves and mutely accept their fate.

Last month, the grant of bail to one of the biggest corporate fraudsters, Ramalinga Raju had created some amount of hubbub among people. Raju’s accomplices – his brother and former managing director Rama Raju, former chief financial officer Vadlamani Srinivas, the two partners of the audit firm, Pricewaterhouse, Gopalakrishnan and Srinivas – were already given bail. People do know that ultimately nothing will happen to Raju, but to grant him bail even before the investigations were over was a little too much to swal­low. Had the Supreme Court not inter­vened against this bail, Raju would have been already a free bird. Interestingly, around the same time, another case that curiously stirred up people, particularly dalits, Muslims and civil rights activists in the same state of Andhra Pradesh was the Ayesha Meera murder case in which an apparently innocent dalit youth was awarded life imprisonment, seemingly to save the real culprit who came from a powerful political family.

Who Is Satyam Babu?

Satyam Babu may be said to be the oppo­site of Ramalinga Raju of Satyam Comput­ers. He is a poor dalit boy in his early 20s, whereas Raju is an upper caste – Telugu kshatriya (Raju is a Telugu variation of the Sanskrit word raja meaning king), in his late 50s, having already lived a “royal” life. Babu is said to be a part time mason, who indulged in petty thieving as evidenced at least by the six-month jail term he under­went for stealing a cellphone. He did what­ever he could for the sheer survival of his mother, sister and himself. Ramalinga Raju was one of the most respected business leaders, one of the leading lights of the new breed of entrepreneurs in the field of information technology (IT), much deco­rated by the corporate world. He indulged in stealing for sheer greed, the unending lust for accumulation.

Babu perhaps thieved from faceless strangers and Raju stole from his share­holders in utter breach of their faith. Babu’s confession was extracted in the Ayesha Meera case by the police through brutal torture, which turned him into a mental wreck. Raju confessed when his crime had already surfaced in the media and could no more be covered up. He then drove in his Mercedes cavalcade and surrendered to the police. Anyone going through the court proceedings would doubt whether Satyam Babu is really guilty of the crime for which he has already earned imprisonment for life. There is no doubt about Raju’s crime which happens to be the biggest crime in the history of corpo­rate India and yet no charge sheet has been filed against him. Babu does not have the resources to defend himself whereas Raju has a battery of legal luminaries at his dis­posal to create turbulence for his eventual escape. In many ways, Satyam Babu and Satyam Raju present a stark contrast and illustrate how a poor and innocent dalit boy could be literally dumped in jail for the rest of his life and how nothing happens to an upper caste and upper class criminal, all under the due process of law.

Satyam Babu is currently languishing in Vijayawada jail, convicted with life impris­onment by the sessions’ judge for allegedly raping and killing 17-year-old Ayesha in a girls’ hostel at Ibrahimpatnam. The case, because of the incredible narrative con­structed by the prosecution, has created a huge uproar in Andhra Pradesh. While Satyam Babu was tortured in the jail into confessing the crime he never committed, in the process damaging his spinal cord and creating the Guillen Barre syndrome that has disabled him, Ramalinga Raju, who admitted having defrauded the public for Rs 7,800 crore over six years, is enjoy­ing special facilities in the Chanchalguda Central jail in Hyderabad.

Finding a Scapegoat

Right from the beginning, the Ayesha Meera case got engulfed in controversy as people, including the chairman, AP State Minori­ties Commission, Janab Yousuf Qureshi, and a member of the National Commis­sion for Women, Nirmala Venkatesh, who visited the scene suspected connivance of the warden and insiders in the crime. The student community and the public agitated over the issue and demanded the arrest of the culprit. The matter soon entered the state assembly, mounting pres­sure on police. The Ibrahimpatnam police went berserk, arresting a number of persons and eventually settled on a hapless poor dalit boy, Satyam Babu of Anasagaram vil­lage, a hamlet of Nandigama in Krishna district, as the culprit. They tortured him and extracted a confession. The Mahila Sessions Court in Vijayawada held him guilty of the crime only by matching his handwriting with a love letter allegedly found on the body of Ayesha and the DNA profile of the criminal created by the police. The sentence created a further public uproar because it is strongly believed that the letter and the DNA profile were fabricated by the police. Interest­ingly, before Satyam Babu the police had succeeded in matching one or the other marks of the crime with the previous sus­pects and declared that the Ayesha mur­der case was solved. They later retracted as those suspects turned out to be not as defenceless as Satyam Babu.

Shamshad Begum, Ayesha’s mother, an educated and articulate lady has been making public statements that the police was making a scapegoat of Satyam Babu in order to save the real criminal in Koneru Satish Babu, sarpanch of Gudavalli village, and the grandson of former minister Koneru Ranga Rao in YSR’s as well as Rosai­ah’s government. Indeed, there was strong evidence against him. He frequently visited the hostel and had parties with the warden Padma and her husband. On that fateful night also, he had partied, parking his Scor­pio before the hostel. The next day he admitted himself into the Chennamaneni Pali clinic in Vijayawada without any rea­son. It is said that the police commissioner had gathered these details and was about to arrest him but was thwarted by the politicians. The local people, the hostel inmates and those who examined the scene of the murder, including Nirmala Venkatesh, dismissed the possibility of any outsider committing the crime without connivance of the warden or some insider. Therefore, they demanded a narcoanaly­sis test on K Satish Babu, the warden’s hus­band and Cheruku Madhav Rao, Mandal Parishad President, who had visited the scene before the police arrived. Dalit, Muslim, and civil rights organisations, campaigning against the injustice to Satyam Babu have demanded reinvestigation of the case by some independent agency.

Sheltering the Big Sharks

During the colonial times, it is sometimes alleged that white British people received favourable treatment vis-à-vis Indians by the courts, but, by and large, equality before the law prevailed. Although our Constitution imbibed that principle, our practice has recoiled to the native code of Manu where people are differentiated by caste and its contemporary correlate, class. How else do we find no big shark ever falling into the net? Right from the first corporate crime of Haridas Mundra, who sold fake shares of his companies to the willing buyer in Life Insurance Corporation in the 1950s to the current Satyam fraud, or the numerous cases of corruption by politicians and bureaucrats, no one really ever gets punished. It is a standing testi­mony to their crime that India, according to Swiss Banking Association Report 2008, has $1,891 billion of black money, more than all the black money of the rest of the world, stashed away in Swiss banks. Occa­sionally, there may be some forced resigna­tion of a minister or an arrest of some cul­prit, but never does it lead to the confisca­tion of their wealth or conviction commen­surate with the crime. As for Raju, he has already retracted his admission and turned the tables onto the Central Bureau of Investigation to prove his crime. It is any­body’s guess what will happen to him!

Talking of the other recent scams, Suresh Kalmadi of the CWG fame, the scam that shamed the nation for more than a month preceding the games was report­edly “snubbed” for his misdoing but was found coolly enjoying the Guangzhou games without any trace of remorse. In an act of political expediency, while Ashok Chavan was made to resign, the other political bigwigs like Sushil Kumar Shinde, Vilasrao Deshmukh and scores of babus involved in the making of the Adarsh Soci­ety scam, remain respectably untouched. A Raja of the 2G scam has been made to resign from his post as the union telecom minister but others who enabled the scam, directly or indirectly, or shared the booty, will remain untouched. For the Chavans or the Rajas, or the Madhu Kodas before them, it is just an interlude; everyone knows that they will soon be back with redoubled zeal. Can anyone imagine that Kalmadi or Raja or their accomplices will really be serving life imprisonment with all their properties confiscated? That privi­lege seems to be reserved only for a poor dalit of Satyam Babu’s ilk!

Dr Anand Teltumbde is a writer, political analyst and civil rights activist with CPDR, Mumbai