By TCN Staff Writer,
New Delhi: Justice Markandey Katju, who last month retired from Supreme Court and now has been appointed chairman of Press Council of India, has strongly condemned both media and police for painting the picture of Muslims as bomb throwers. Without mincing words he said Indian police is not trained for forensic investigations and so terror cases remain unresolved.
He criticized the media for jumping to the conclusions within a few hours of bomb blasts merely on the basis of e-mails or messages sent on mobiles. “ﾅthe tendency is to brand all Muslims in the country as terrorists and bomb throwers,” Hindustan Times quoted him as saying on 10th Oct. 2011.
Justice Markandey Katju [Photo Courtesy: The Hindu]
Justice Katju reiterated his view in an interview with NDTV on 17th Oct. “The point is that they cannot catch the real culprits, so whomever they think may have committed the crime they catch hold of them,” he said in the interview. Training and equipment to conduct scientific investigations is absent in India so it is done by suspicion. Some bomb blast takes place, they catch hold of the local Muslims and young people and implicate them, he added.
Justice Katju suggested that media could be put to be corrected either through the “democratic way by discussions, consultations and persuasion or by using harsh measures by way of imposing heavy fines on defaulters, stopping government advertisements to them and suspending their licences”.
Several terror blasts over the last two years have gone unsolved. They include bomb blasts in Bangalore, Varanasi, Pune, Mumbai and most recently New Delhi.