Judging the Judgement.

       “The Country has moved on.” , they claimed. “But will the saffron brigade accept the verdict?”, they asked. This nature of the question was indicative of the fact that the people asking it had already made up their mind regarding what the verdict would be or rather should be. That question accompanied by visuals of 1992 was used to reinforce stereotypes of certain organizations and create an atmosphere of impending tragedy. Finally, the verdict came and the nation accepted it without incident. All parties involved accepted it gracefully. There were no losers and no winners. The nation truly had moved on, except for one section. The Media.

       While the nation heaved a sigh of relief, a storm was brewing inside each newsroom. First, the court ‘overturned’ the verdict which the news channels had already delivered in the days preceding the actual one. Secondly, the humble poise maintained by the ‘Saffron Brigade’ following a favorable verdict belied the rabble-rousing stereotypes that the media had so carefully carved over the years. As the day passed, each newsroom turned into a courtroom. Each anchor was a judge, each expert a prosecution lawyer. In the dock were the three judges. Their crime: Delivering a judgment not palatable to the news makers. Within hours, the ‘experts’ had analyzed the 10,000 page judgment (in the process creating a world record for fastest reading) and declared it a ‘panchayati verdict’ on the basis of arguments ranging from the absurd to the imaginary. Some of these arguments were:

       • Archeological Evidence was contentious: When a case is argued in a court of law, each and every piece of evidence is contested by opposing parties. This is exactly why lawyers are said to have ‘argued’ in courts. It’s for the judges to decide which piece of evidence to accept and which to reject. The reasons for accepting the archeological evidence were mentioned clearly in the judgment as mentioned in this article. Only if the wise men in the media had bothered to read.

       • There was no reference to 1992: As mentioned endlessly by the media itself, the case was a title suit based on historical possession. The first case itself was filed more than a hundred years before the demolition of the structure. The bench, therefore, did not have the mandate to comment on 1992. Strange that a media which is complaining of judicial outreach would expect the court to do exactly the same when it suits them. Or maybe, not so strange.

       • Court has chosen faith over law: Conveniently, the main stream media (MSM) forgets that all the points raised by the Waqf board have been set aside by the courts on purely legal grounds. And as concerns the Ram Janmabhoomi, the observations of the bench were in reply to questions asked of it. The judgment itself was not based on this observation alone. It was backed by documents compiled over centuries and evidence presented by the ASI. Facts which the MSM chose to ignore.

       The problem, for the MSM, does not seem to be the verdict itself, but the parties who stand to gain by it. For decades, the MSM has portrayed the Sangh Parivar as the culprits of the 1992 episode. Though the judgment makes no comment on the episode itself, the MSM considers it to be a vindication of the ideological position taken by the Saffron parties. Hence, while the whole nation seems to have accepted the truce formula presented by the court, the media itself finds it hard to digest. Clearly a case of ‘Justice will be delivered only if judgment is in my favor’.