The curios case of Sushant Singh Rajput’s Suicide.

For weeks one television channel has been telling the country that there is nothing more important in the country than the suicide of Sushant Singh Rajput.

This channel has put out salacious details of the Bollywood night life and tried to link one young leader of the ruling alliance, Aaditya Thackeray with the suicide.

There were a string of suicides (alleged) among people who were connected to each other. Sushant Singh Rajput, a brilliant student, committed suicide or was murdered for money is a matter of investigation in the city of Mumbai, where the incident or the crime took place as one may classify it as such. Law and Order is a state subject and only a crime that has national implications or where the courts think that it is not possible to have a fair investigation, they transfer the case out of the state. One such famous case that was transferred out of the state was the encounter case of Sohrabuddin Shaikh whose abduction and murder took place in Gujarat and in which the Minister of State for Home in the cabinet of Narendra Modi, Mr. Amit Shah was the main accused. The courts transferred the case to CBI and moved it to Bombay High Court when the case did not make much progress in Gujarat. It is in this case that the Supreme Court had set up a CBI court in Mumbai and passed orders that a single judge will hear the case from start to end and there will be no transfers. But just as the first judge was about to pronounce the verdict, the Bombay High Court Chief Justice Mohit Shah, transferred the judge out of Mumbai, replaced him with Judge Loya. Judge Loya was close to delivering a judgment when he allegedly passed away from a heart attack in Nagpur while on an official visit there. Later the family claimed foul play but heaven and earth was moved to prevent an investigation into this case.

Coming back to the Sushant Singh Rajput saga, the case involved wealth and women and also had a political angle as Aaditya Thackeray was found to be a common friend with the actor and the accused.

Aaditya Thackeray is the son of Maharashtra CM, Uddhav Thackeray. BJP and Shiv Sena fought the 2019 Maharashtra elections as a combine but fell out before government formation as BJP apparently went back on the power sharing formula that the combine had worked out before the elections. Shiv Sena, in a complete volte face formed a post election alliance with NCP and Congress to form MVA (Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi). This left the BJP in the lurch. BJP has since then been trying to topple the government in Maharashtra and form a government of its own but has met with little success.

And the way MVA has functioned till date, BJP’s chances of forming a government, even after winning 105 of 282 seats looks remote as Uddhav has emerged as a good leader especially in the times of Corona Virus.

Frustrated with the situation, the BJP has been trying every trick in the book to show MVA in bad light. But the crux is that it can’t form a government without the support of Shiv Sena or NCP. It did make an aborted and shameful attempt to form a government by aligning itself with NCP one morning only to see that it ended with egg on the face as it gave Ajit Pawar a clean chit in the 1,00,000 Crore irrigation scam, got him sworn in as Deputy CM only to see Ajit Pawar returning to NCP before the government could start to function.

Now BJP smells a hint of scandal in the Sushant Singh Rajput’s case and wants to get its hooks into the government. It has used the services of this news channel to create doubts in the minds of people that only a CBI inquiry can reveal the real reasons. Meanwhile the accusations have been on the live in partner of Sushant Singh Rajput to have siphoned off huge amounts of money leaving him poor. The family of Sushant Singh Rajput incidentally is from Bihar.

The father has filed a case in Patna and Government of Bihar, which has been an all round failure, especially in the reverse migration issue and Corona outbreak has latched on to the case to divert people’s attention from its governance failures.

The Bihar Government went to Supreme Court and asked that the case be transferred to CBI and strangely the courts have allowed this to happen setting up a new precedent.

• The precedent that has been set is worrying because;
• A crime may happen in one city / state but an FIR can be filed in any state.
• A case can be filed any where in the country by another state even when it has no jurisdiction on the case.
• The case can thus be investigated at the place of filing of FIR and also under the jurisdiction where the offense has taken place.
• The state where the family or any interested party is living can thus ask the case to be transferred to the other state.
• In case of any whiff of dispute, the Supreme Court can transfer the case to a Central Investigation Agency, like the CBI and take it out of the hands of police of both states.
• A media trial can influence the minds of the people of the country and large scale character assassination be done to those ‘accused’ in the case and allegations can fly thick and strong.

The reasons given by the Supreme Court in its judgment also seem to give undue importance to the suicide of a person who, according to the courts, was an aspiring actor whose death calls for a fit and proper investigation to reveal the truth.

Alas, the courts did not think the same in the case of so many others, including their own brother judge Loya.