With the arrest of Bina Ramani last week it can be safely said that Manu Sharma will get away with murder twice. There will be no justice for Jessica Lall because the Special Investigation Team (SIT) set up to establish a new case against her killer has turned the investigation into a tragic farce. Ramani is one of only three witnesses who have dared to identify Manu Sharma as the killer, the others being her daughter Malini and husband Georges Maillhot, and the police seem determined to break her or there would have been no need for the non-bailable warrant that resulted in her meaningless arrest.

The SIT is supposed to be investigating murder and gives us instead charges against Ramani that by no stretch of the judicial imagination merit incarceration. But, this is India, so the man who killed Jessica because she refused to give him a drink now runs his own bar in Chandigarh and has a father who is a minister in Haryana’s Congress government. And, Ramani goes to jail for allegedly forging some document and running a bar without a licence. She has already paid a fine for the unlicensed bar and her restaurant has been closed for the past seven years, so where was the need to arrest her if not to intimidate her? Besides, was the SIT set up to examine murder or forgery?

Jessica’s senseless, tragic murder should have been an open-and-shut case. She was behind the bar in Ramani’s restaurant when Manu Sharma and his friends walked in. When she told him the bar was closed, he took out a pistol and shot her in the head. He then fled abandoning his car outside the restaurant. It was Ramani and Georges who chased after him, they who called the police and asked them to impound his SUV, they who took Jessica to the hospital, they who refused to change their evidence (everyone else did) and it is they who have been consistently targeted by the police and, oddly enough, by the media.

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