THE Sheena Bora murder case, in which her mother, television executive and INX Network Co-founder Indrani Mukherjea, and Indrani’s husband Peter Mukherjea, former CEO of Star India, are now accused, burst into the media in August 2015. In a flash, as details came tumbling out in shock-a-minute succession, the case snatched away eyeballs from all other news and quickly spiralled into an all consuming, ‘Breaking News’ propelled, endless media soap opera. Former Indian Express Editor Shekhar Gupta tweeted, ‘Give this to Indrani Mukherjea to have single-handedly "calmed" Patel agitation, market meltdown and even onion prices out of the headlines.’

Through the year, revelation after fresh revelation has held media and media consumers transfixed, with almost every reader or viewer, like in the recent Aarushi Talwar murder case, now transformed into a juror with their own pet theories on murderer and motive. Like the hysterically high voltage coverage of the Aarushi Talwar murder case, the Sheena Bora murder case too has become a luridly unfolding morality play, with police sources clearly feeding reporters with details of Indrani and Peter’s as well as Indrani’s second husband, Sanjeev Khanna’s arrest and life behind bars. That a mother should be accused of brutally murdering her own daughter, attempting to dispose off the body and then, according to some reports, even ‘partying’ after the deed was done evokes horror-stricken fascination about the lives of the rich and famous. The media is obsessed with the rich yet is paradoxically also highly judgmental about affluence, and likes nothing better than an alluring horror story in a Five Star setting.

The sudden transfer of Mumbai Police Commissioner Rakesh Maria just as his team was probing the financial details of the Mukherjeas, on the rather unconvincing grounds of overseeing Ganesh Chaturthi festival arrangements, brought a shock of hard reality into the Technicolor movie playing out in prime time. The question arose: does this case go to far greater depths of wrongdoing in high places than simply a murder mystery set in London and Mumbai? Parties like the NCP have alleged that Maria was removed as his investigations were about to expose money laundering and possibly implicate influential business houses.

Whatever the dark machinations behind the case, the media – both print and electronic – simply could not get enough of the Sheena Bora murder case. In times of rapid social transformation, anxiety about loss of culture and the traditional way of life coexists with a hankering for upward mobility. We thrill to images of glamour and ‘westernized’ glitz, even as we piously asset the traditional Indian-ness of our identity.

 

The journey of Sheena’s biological mother Indrani Mukherjea from Guwahati via Kolkata to Worli surely parallels the chaiwala-to-prime minister upwardly mobile dream that grips all Indians. Yet, when this social ascent of an ambitious woman is marked by unbridled sexually assertive images of skimpy clothes and glasses of wine then we become transfixed, in a mix of admiration and voyeurism, at the pitfalls of westernized success. The fact that Indrani and her husband Peter were once co-founders of the INX Network also adds to the media’s frenzy: universal envy of those who clawed to the top of the heap makes their downfall all the more tantalizing.

In an interesting article in The Times of India, diplomat Devyani Khobragade – herself the glamorous target of a media storm over her travails with her domestic help in the US – wrote that the media’s fixation with Indrani Mukherjea reflects a society’s fixation with the femme fatale, the fallen woman; we get patriarchal pleasure when the woman who steps out of the traditional mould gets her just desserts. Other rather snobby columnists have even argued that the fate of Indrani is what awaits those lowly provincial beauties who dare to storm exclusive social networks on the strength of mere oomph. Still others believe that the Sheena Bora case is yet another example of Page Three’s conquest of Page One, an example of how a story on celebrity crime drives out news of the Patel agitation and firing on the LoC. The Sheena Bora case once again reveals the media’s race for TRPs and eyeballs and signals the slow death of news journalism.

There is no doubt that the media would have probably lost all interest in the story had there not been photogenic faces to go along with the copy. Like in the Sunanda Pushkar case, every story on further twists in the criminal investigation must inevitably be accompanied by ultra glamorous photos of the Tharoors at glittering events, because these are not after all crime stories but celebrity stories.

 

The massive interest in the Sheena Bora case illustrates another cultural fear. In times when idealized saas bahu serials and family sagas dominate entertainment, a family saga gone horribly wrong talks to the cultural anxiety about loss of family ties. A 2012 report by Helpage India shows that over 30 per cent elderly parents suffer abuse from their own children and 98 per cent do not report the abuse for fear of violent reprisals. According to the National Crime Records Bureau, dowry deaths showed a steady increase from 2007-2011. Assaults on minors often come from family members. Her grandson murdered 67-year old Sarla Patel of Mumbai so he could steal money for a motorcycle. A 2012 Lancet report reveals suicide rates in the 15-29 age group are the highest in India and experts say a major reason for this is breakdown of communication with family.

 

A story in which Indrani Mukherjea, the mother accused of killing her own daughter, is the final example of the death of the great Indian family, where the lust for property and wealth is seen to negate even the purest of all bonds – that between mother and child. Khap panchayat killings, honour killings, vendetta killings by parents of their offspring are hardly unknown in rural and semi-urban communities; yet the slaying of a daughter by a mother in supposedly an educated and affluent family cannot but make headlines at a time when the Indian family as an institution is seen to be experiencing assaults from the generation gap and material competitiveness. No wonder films like Ham Aapke Hain Kaun or the more recent Prem Ratan Dhan Paayo are such hits, precisely because they evoke a nostalgic era of ceremonial family life now fast disappearing.

Speculation that Indrani put Sheena to death simply because an apartment was in her name instead of in the name of her other daughter Vidhie only adds to the sheer moral degradation exemplified by this case. The killing of 21-year old student Bhawna by her parents does not get the same media coverage as Indrani and Peter because the coverage is hardly a quest for justice or social change. The media carnival spins because we are somehow comforted by the travails of the successful.

Another interesting feature of this case has been the predicament of Rakesh Maria. Widely seen as one of the most competent officers in the Mumbai police, his personal interest in the case only sparked off more media speculation. When he was suddenly transferred from the Police Commissioner’s office to DG Home Guards, there were again more questions than answers. The Maharashtra government had no satisfactory explanation to offer, initially trying to suggest that this was a ‘routine’ transfer since he was due a promotion, and then, within a matter of hours, claiming that he would continue to handle the Indrani case.

That the case was eventually transferred to the CBI only confirms how high profile cases in the country are increasingly subject to constant pulls and pressures under an intense media gaze. In the circumstances, is any independent police probe possible if the bona fides of every move by the state are going to be debated in television studios, or does the opaqueness of the investigating systems necessarily mean that officers supervising such a case have to become more media savvy in the future?

 

Media trials in India are not new. The media’s fixation with the glamorous murder began with the Jessica Lal case. Some commentators have even lauded the media and thus the public’s role in pushing along the wheels of justice. The murder of Sheena Bora can no longer be camouflaged in the forests of Raigad outside Mumbai and be forgotten. No, instead an activist news media spurs on the public to demand that justice be done and the high and mighty accused be brought to book. Swaminathan Aiyar wrote about the Jessica Lal case in the Times of India: ‘Hundreds of TV channels in all languages have now made possible a judicial revolution. TV viewers have been transformed from a passive audience into judicial activists. Only asses (sic) can still claim that commercial TV is opium. The new activism is not the activism of media barons, editors or producers. It is the activism of millions of TV viewers. They have become a 21st century jury. TV viewers have not imposed anything on the judiciary. Rather they have persuaded judges to come out of their ivory towers and listen not just to lawyers but to ordinary people.’

 

To rewind a little to the start of TV-inspired ‘justice campaigns’ and media trials. On 21 February 2006, a Delhi trial court headed by Additional Sessions Judge S.L. Bhayana acquitted the nine accused in the Jessica Lal murder case. After extensive hearings with nearly a hundred witnesses, the main accused in the case, Manu Sharma, charged with murder, destruction of evidence, criminal conspiracy and harbouring suspects, and eight other accused, including Vikas Yadav and Amardeep Singh Gill and others, were all acquitted.

The acquittal had an unprecedented effect. Newspapers and TV channels received many calls and smses from viewers and readers. NDTV news channel received more than 200,000 cellphone text messages protesting the acquittal. The Hindustan Times carried a poll saying the public’s faith in law enforcement was 2.7 on a scale of 10. Newspapers ran headlines like ‘Nobody killed Jessica Lal’. Interactivity was followed by activism. Citizens held candlelight marches. There were protest rallies in universities. The Jessica Lal murder case verdict spurred an urban mass movement. Justice for Jessica became a rallying cry in newspapers and TV channels.

Faced with this massive unprecedented public outcry, the courts acted. The Delhi High Court took suo motu cognizance of the lower court’s verdict. On 25 March 2006, the Delhi High Court admitted an appeal by the police against the Jessica Lal murder case acquittals, issuing bailable warrants against main accused Manu Sharma and eight others.

On 9 September 2006, Star News channel broadcast a sting operation showing how Manu Sharma’s influential father Venod Sharma had paid millions to coerce witnesses to change their original testimonies. (In this case, 99 out of 100 witnesses had turned hostile.) Public pressure led to the Congress leadership to come down heavily on Sharma, and he resigned from the Haryana cabinet. On 15 December 2006, the High Court bench of Justice R.S. Sodhi and Justice P.K. Bhasin in a 61-page judgment held Manu Sharma guilty based on existing evidence and on 20 December Manu Sharma was sentenced to life imprisonment. The other accused, Vikas Yadav and Amardeep Singh Gill, were awarded four years of imprisonment each.

 

In many ways the Jessica Lal murder case was a turning point for media driven judicial activism in India. Other cases followed. The Priyadarshini Mattoo murder case had been languishing in the courts ever since the trial court acquitted main accused Santosh Kumar Singh, son of an IG of Police, in 1999. Priyadarshini Mattoo, a 25-year old law student was found raped and murdered at her home in Delhi on 23 January 1996.

With the public outcry on the Jessica Lal murder case, activists also energetically took up the Priyadarshini Mattoo murder case. Now there were two campaigns: Justice for Jessica and Justice for Priyadarshini Mattoo. The net and phone were widely used in this campaign. All Priyadarshini’s friends joined in. Candle lit marches were once again held. Priyadarshini Mattoo’s father Chaman Lal Mattoo made several appearances on TV and in newspapers. The sight of the aged Chaman Lal, frantic with grief for his daughter, became an intensely powerful pressurizing symbol on the judiciary.

On 31 August 2006, six years after the CBI’s appeal against the acquittal, Justices Sodhi and Bhasin took up the case on a day-to-day hearing basis. In a landmark reversal, on 17 October, Santosh Kumar Singh was found guilty of rape and murder and was sentenced to death. The court held that the ‘trial judge had murdered justice and shocked judicial conscience.’ As he was led away, Singh shook his fist at the media and even hit out at a reporter as if to indicate that the media had been a greater enemy to him than the law.

The Nitish Katara murder case of 2002, the BMW hit-and-run case of 1999, the Aarushi Talwar murder case 2008, the Nithari killings case 2007 have all seen an inordinate amount of public activism. Sometimes the media takes up these cases on its own initiative and campaigns relentlessly on its own steam. But the media obsession also arises from the perception – attested by high TRPs – that this is what the public wants to see and takes an intense interest in.

 

The Sheena Bora murder case is unlike the Jessica Lal, Priyadarshini Mattoo or even the Nitish Katara murder cases where public pressure was a campaign to bring the powerful to justice. Although ‘Justice For Sheena’ posters have been seen, yet since the accused are already in jail there is a sense of closure. The Sheena Bora case is in some senses more akin to the Aarushi Talwar murder case where merciless media coverage has created what can only be described as murder porn. In the Aarushi Talwar case, at an infamous press conference, a police officer provided colourfully graphic details of an honour killing, of sexual relations between Aarushi and the manservant Hemraj.

Gurdarshan Singh, Inspector General, Meerut Range, held a press conference – in which he repeatedly forgot Aarushi’s name, yet pronounced with conviction that her death was a drunken honour killing in a home which was apparently a diabolical circus of money, liquor and ‘lifestyle’ – giving voice to many of our secret fears about the darker side of affluence and social advancement.

 

The narrative around Aarushi’s mother Nupur Talwar was always about a hard faced, dry-eyed woman, parents Rajesh and Nupur even portrayed as a couple who led a swinging lifestyle. Perceived moral guilt almost became legal guilt in a case where several questions remain about the impartiality of the judicial process, as brought out in the recent book, Aarushi: Anatomy of a Murder by Avirook Sen. In the midst of inflamed public opinion created by a media blitzkrieg, two teams of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) produced totally conflicting findings.

When celebrities are on trial, reportage sometimes even takes on the qualities of anti-elite social vendetta. In the place of a bereaved mother, the camera saw Nupur Talwar as a composed woman with an angular, rather hard, face. The camera zoomed in on her expressionless eyes and noted with moral outrage that she sometimes touched and clung to her husband.

This is not the mother image the camera likes. We like our television mothers plump, weeping, asexual and dishevelled, without access to top lawyers or the Delhi elite. Our mothers must be objects of pity. If they are not, they must be guilty. No wonder a national daily screamed about Nupur: ‘She’ ate vegetables in jail, ‘she’ read Hanuman Chalisa in jail – almost as if these were activities of a nameless ‘she’, an epithet for an evil she-devil.

Similar reports are being filed about Indrani. Her recent bout of unconsciousness, her meals in jail, her tearful reunions with her daughter in the courtroom, are reported in a manner in which no male undertrial would ever be chronicled. That she is also cast as a desi Medea, one who devours her children and then attends parties, adds to the she-devil image. Whatever the truth of the image, it should not influence the law.

The CBI court’s order denying bail to Nupur Talwar reads: ‘The legal history is replete with instances of matricide and fratricide. Everything is possible in these days of modern era where moral values are fast declining and one can stoop to the lowest level.’ Ideally the Aarushi-Hemraj case should not be about judicial purple prose on matricide, fratricide and the decline of moral values in the modern era, but about evidence and a dispassionate search for the truth.

 

The Aarushi case and the Sheena case are quite different in the kinds of interest they have aroused. In Aarushi, there was a clear split in opinion, each side passionately arguing the innocence or guilt of the Talwars. The Sheena Bora case, at least from the police point of view, appears more done and dusted, resting as it does on the detailed, if a trifle surprising confession of Indrani’s driver Shyam Manohar Rai, who allegedly helped in the murder.

Yet, like the Aarushi case, the Sheena Bora murder case is becoming a collective exorcism of the ills of society in general and family in particular. The disturbing truth in all of this is whether the judicial process can remain insulated from the cacophony and television jurists or whether the justice process itself can fall prey to playing to public galleries.

Many feel this is exactly what happened in the Aarushi case with the Talwars simply not getting a fair trial not only because of the botched CBI investigation but also because of the anti-elite class war ratcheted up by the media. In that surcharged atmosphere it would have made it impossible to arraign the servants (as the first CBI team in fact did) for fear of the perception that the judicial system had been hijacked by the high and mighty passing the blame to their helpless domestic staff. However much we may dislike Indrani and Peter Mukherjea, the fact is that they can only be pronounced guilty by a court and not by TV studios. Trial by media may be needed to prod a lethargic system into fast track justice delivery, but when the lens of the camera becomes the eye of the judiciary then serious questions can arise about the fairness of the trial.

Celebrity centred cultures across the world have seen frenzied reportage of high profile criminal cases such as those involving O.J. Simpson or Oscar Pistorius, so India is by no means an isolated example. Where our reportage is curiously unaware of itself is that openly patriarchal and prurient stereotypes are allowed to determine the focus of the reports. The lifestyle or sartorial choices of Indrani should hardly be proof of her guilt or innocence yet she is already the vamp, even as Peter Mukherjea and Sanjeev Khanna are spared similar value judgments.

The Sheena Bora murder case is revelatory not just of the crimes celebrities commit but also about how a wealth obsessed society creates its own demons. We follow their crimes transfixed not just because they are distant celebrities but also because the descent into immorality and criminality is only a magnified projection of what we know to be true in daily life. After all the Sheena Bora case is only six degrees of separation from present day ‘normalcy’ of khap killings, abandonment of parents, dowry deaths and rape of minors.