Who will arrest the police? Don't just blame the beedi baron for the security guard's death

It’s a classic Ugly Indian story – the beedi baron running wild.

The story of Adakkaparambil Muhammad Nisham has all the elements we are used to. The rich spoiled tycoon used to getting away with everything perhaps even murder is almost a standard trope these days. But it’s shocking even in a country where life, especially of the poor, routinely feels cheap. A security guard takes a few minutes longer than he should have to open a gate and pays for it with his life.

Perhaps Nisham just pushed his luck too far when he allegedly rammed his Hummer into Chandrabose, a security guard, who did not open the gates fast enough at 2:30 am, pinning him to the wall and leaving him with injuries that finally resulted in his death.

Nisham has earned the hashtag #KIllerTycoon but an in-depth profile by Shaju Philip for Indian Express reveals a more shocking truth.

Nisham was a repeat offender. And until security guard Chandrabose died he had gotten away each time. He had the two things you need to create an armour of impunity around yourself - money and power – and he wielded both like weapons.

According to IE, Nisham locked a woman sub-inspector who had stopped him for driving under the influence of alcohol in his Rolls Royce.

He was arrested for allowing his nine-year-old son to drive a Ferrari but he got out on bail.

He has faced an attempt to murder case for ransacking someone’s house.

His wife has filed (and then withdrawn) a domestic violence case against him.

It’s a long and sordid laundry list of accusations but they make one thing clear. Whatever Nisham did that night in his Hummer did not happen out of the blue. That sense of impunity had been building for some time. He was convinced in his head he was untouchable at least when it came to the law.

Now he is charged under the Kerala Anti-Social Activities Prevention Act (KAPA)  but that’s after nine registered cases against him. Had the security guard not died Nisham would have just continued on his rampage. Horrifying as his behavior is, it’s no less horrifying to realize that someone has to lose their life in order to force the law and order system to do its job.

“We are not sure whether we can trust the police. We want a CBI probe” a relative of the dead man tells The NewsMinute .

And why should they trust the police? Nisham got away with criminal behaviour in the past because he threw around his connections with a top IUML politician and because he thought he could intimidate his way out of everything. And if that failed to do the trick he could always buy his way out. As IE reports, he would approach police, middlemen, businessmen with wads of currency notes. “Even the complainants figure out soon enough that it’s better to be in his good books,’’ says a police officer. Chandrabose’s relatives have complained his statement was not taken by the police while the police had said he was unconscious. Kerala media say strings are being pulled in high places to help him.

This noxious blend of power, politics and money is hardly unique to Nisham. In 2013 Richa Yadav, daughter-in-law of a Samajwadi Party leader brought in policemen wielding machine guns to assault a pharmacist who had committed the unpardonable sin of not stocking the cough syrup she wanted. When the pharamacist called the cops and tried to show them the CCTV footage they did nothing until the story hit the media. They waited seven days to even file the FIR.

We have had politicians assault toll booth workers for daring to ask for toll from them. And of course we have had the case of Jessica Lal shot dead for refusing to pour a drink after hours and the son of a political heavyweight almost succeeding in turning what seemed to be an open-shut case on its head as witness after witness turned hostile.

It is not just a story of the rich and powerful running amuck but a story of a cowed police force that acts either as mute spectators or even worse, as glorified errand boys for the powers that be. Justice in India is indeed blind, as in, blind to the shenanigans of the likes of Nisham.

And if the way the Jessica Lal case initially turned out is any indication, the fact that Chandrabose’s fellow security guards have given detailed eye witness accounts to the police is no promise of a fair trial. They will not be the first witnesses to lose courage as the case winds through a long and laborious process. Or simply disappear. Or be shot dead or stabbed as is happening in the Asaram Bapu case. The Nishams of the world have all the time and money that the Chandraboses do not.

The story of Chandrabose trapped to the wall by a Hummer driven by an irate beedi king sounds like a tale where the worst of feudal India collides with the worst of the new rich India. But the horror of what Nisham is accused of doing to the hapless security guard masks a sobering realization. Would Chandrabose have been alive if the system had worked the way it was supposed to against a man who already had 12 criminal cases filed against him? Three were settled or withdrawn by the complainants but even when he was chargesheeted he would get bail within a day or two. The cases were not even speed bumps along his way.

Nisham should certainly be held accountable for what he is accused of. But the system too needs to be held accountable. We read the story of Nisham as a horror tale of a truly rotten apple. But it’s equally a story of a truly rotten system.