Ravindra Waso and Sanjay Dutt: A tale of two boys

by Anirudha Dutta and Chiradeep Dutta It is almost 20 years since that fateful day in March 1993 that the Supreme Court had announced sentences on the key accused brought to trial. The most high profile of the accused and now sentenced to imprisonment for five years is Hindi film star Sanjay Dutt. Naturally he has attracted most attention during this trial and now there has been an outpouring of support, primarily from the world of films and politics. In our view, it has reached ridiculous proportions where ludicrous reasons are being advanced on why Sanjay Dutt should be pardoned. Some of the reasons are “humanitarian grounds”, “nice boy”, “ revived the memory of Mahatma Gandhi through his films ” etc. If we probably looked at the lives of each of the accused, we may find equally, if not more, extenuating circumstances with the exception that the others have not acted in films and these others do not belong to any cozy club. We may also find that economically speaking many of the other accused probably had extenuating circumstances. Living in extreme poverty they accepted assignments for a pittance when not aware of the complete picture and therefore, may deserve our sympathies since they were forced into a world of crime. [caption id=“attachment_677390” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  File photo: Indian officials inspect bomb damage in the basement of the Air India building, one of a series of bombs that rocked the western port city of Mumbai. AFP[/caption] Sanjay Dutt has no such extenuating circumstances that his case should be leniently looked at. If anything he has already been given an extremely lenient sentence, as Ram Jethmalani has pointed out. None of Sanjay Dutt’s supporters have yet said he is innocent of what he has been accused of. Books like Black Friday, based on exhaustive research, and this article in Indian Express - Sanjay Dutt did more than just keep a gun for self-protection in 1993 - give a fairly detailed description of what Sanjay Dutt did. Transcripts of Sanjay Dutt’s conversations with the underworld have been released by the Mumbai police. Twenty years is a long time for a case to be decided - justice delayed is justice denied. And it is not fair on any of the accused, whether it is Yakub Memon or Sanjay Dutt. It is also not fair on the victims and their families. Now let me reproduce a small story. Chiradeep Dutta and I went to IIT, Kharagpur and he was a couple of years junior to me. One of our fellow alumni was a victim of those bomb blasts in 1993. The following is Chiradeep’s anguished email on seeing the chorus of support that leniency be shown to Sanjay Dutt, a chorus to which senior politicians from many political parties (BJP so far is an honorable exception) have also joined in. Chiradeep writes: “Sanjay Dutt was born in one of the most affluent and influential families of India. His father was a great actor who later turned into a politician. His mother was a beauty queen known for many a memorable roles with the great RK. Born into affluence, the young Dutt took to drugs at an early age. The company he kept, was a gang of ruffians, to put it mildly. At the age of 14 he had done stuff the consent age for which is 1 in his country and by the time he was sixteen he had his personal revolver (for self defence of course). At the age of 18 he acted in his first film which catapulted him into stardom. The rest, as they say, is history. Matters were all fine till the day he visited Dubai and met Chota Shakeel, Anees Ibrahim and his infamous brother. At that time he was in his early thirties, still immature and impressionable. Being a celebrity, one has to make allowance for his ignorance of laws and for his arrogance which told him that law would never be able to touch him. So he asked his new friends to supply him a few AK56s (only two, I think), 20 hand grenades and about 100 rounds of ammunition. Obviously he asked these for self defence and of course he didn’t have any inkling who his new friends were. And as the article in Indian Express shows he also wanted to destroy some of these evidences - not exactly the work of an innocent. His sisters, his father did not feel the need for getting such “security”. About the time when young Sanjay Dutt was toying with an array of imported cars and learning to play with revolvers of various bores, there was another boy struggling with his books. He came from a poor family and belonged to the non-descript town of Akola. About 6 years younger to Dutt, this man knew that the only way to break the shackles of poverty was through hard work. So young Ravindra worked hard day after day, year after year. He topped the SSC exams from his district in 1983. Recognising his liking for mathematics, a school teacher advised him to be a civil engineer. He worked hard with his limited books and frugal guidance that the small town of Akola could offer. In 1985, he took the IIT JEE exams and qualified. He was offered a seat in Civil Engineering in IIT Kharagpur. When I met him for the first time, he was a shy boy, not very good at communicating with others. However, beneath the cover of shyness was a man with steely resolve. He persevered. Through the four years of B Tech course, Ravindra Waso was one of the few guys who loved his job and was determined to be a good civil engineer. He did just that as the topper of Civil Engineering in 1989. Thereafter, he joined NITIE in Mumbai to do a course in Industrial Engineering. It came as no surprise, when he topped his batch in 1991. On that fateful day in 1993, he was sent on an assignment to the BSE. Till several hours after the blasts no one knew of his whereabouts. Then they found his remains, a pair of shoes and a tattered shirt drenched in blood. As Bollywood stands united in support of Sanjay Dutt, I ask whether the same Bollywood is ready to stand up for Ravindra Waso and demand justice for him? Was he not important and was his potential to contribute for this nation any lesser than Sanjay Dutt?” Any chorus of support for justice to Ravindra after twenty years of his gruesome death? How have his parents suffered in these twenty years? And why Ravindra alone? All those hundreds who were maimed and killed on that fateful day deserve some sympathy and justice rather than the wayward son of nice parents who were also large public figures. Chiradeep Datta is working as an oil and gas professional for the past 24 years. An electrical engineer by qualification, Chiradeep has been associated with the natural gas industry since 1989. His areas of expertise include Project Execution, Process Engineering and Process Safety management. Views expressed here are personal.