Storyteller cops and the ‘300 pieces' theory

Without those ‘300 pieces’, the whole drama surrounding Maria Susairaj would not exist. Without that touch of savagery to the narrative, the murder of Neeraj Grover would be a run-of-the-mill ‘crime of passion’ story that happens every day, in every corner of the country.

That the characters involved were rather unusual — one a Naval officer, another a well-placed executive with an advertising firm and the third an actress trying to find her feet in Mumbai’s fabled film industry – would have raised some curiosity but the excitement would have died out soon. The ‘300 pieces’ provided the right dose of shock quotient and sensation value to story. So the media lapped it up without a question when the police came public with their account of the murder and its aftermath.

Three hundred pieces? Isn’t that a bit bizarre? Five would have done as well. Nobody ever asked the police then whether it was true, whether they had really counted the pieces, or raised questions whether it was easy to cut a human body into that many bits, particularly when the forensic evidence showed that the rib cage and the skull were intact. The police story had to be swallowed blindly.

It had great headline potential.

Reporters were in no mood to listen when Maria Susairaj’s lawyer wanted to disprove this ‘300 piece’ myth. It pointed at their gullibility. The lawyer was unwittingly trying to make the point that the media was taken for a ride by the cops. This was unacceptable. There has been no effort to get to the bottom of the 300 pieces theory.

That takes us to topic of the police as great storytellers. And the media as the mesmerised listener.

Wind back to the Malegaon blasts of 2006. The Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) of the Maharashtra Police was quick to put the blame on the usual suspect, SIMI (Students’ Islamic Movement of India), just days after the explosions that killed more than 30 people and left 200 injured. Parallels were discovered between the 11 July 2006 Mumbai train explosions and the blasts at the communally sensitive town.

The press was soon flooded with stories – apparently divulged by highly reliable sources in the police establishment — of SIMI sleeper cells, silent modules, Lashkar-e-Taiba connections, training in terrorist camps in the Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir and the spider web of activities laid by the terror outfits across neighbouring countries. In fact, the same stories have been getting rehashed after every major incident since the last few years with some characters getting shuffled, renamed and being placed in new locations.

In the Malegaon case, the police junked suggestions that Hindu fundamentalist groups could be involved since RDX is only available to Islamic terrorist outfits and the Hindu outfits had no expertise in producing sophisticated bombs. Eight people were arrested and charge-sheeted.

Four years down the line, the police’s story has turned on its head. The National Investigative Agency claims to have established that radical Hindu groups were behind the blasts. Not only that, it has become clearer now that the same group was involved in the Samjhuata blasts of 2007, Malegaon blasts of 2008, Mecca Masjid blasts of May 2007, and the 2007 Ajmer blasts. It is interesting to note that in all the major blasts post 2006, the footprint of rogue elements in Hindu organisations is more pronounced while that of the Islamic terrorists is far too subdued.

So what happens to all those stories we have been hearing till now? Was there a deliberate effort from the police establishments across the country to project the menace of Islamic terror bigger than it actually is? The courts certainly don’t buy the police’s story without doubts. The conviction rate in cases of terror is below 10% in the country. It means around 90% of ‘facts’ on terrorism floated in the media and produced in charge sheets remains in the realm of fiction.

The ‘300 pieces’ in Maria Susairaj’s case belongs to the same genre of fiction. It carries the sensation value and that indecipherable X factor common to all whodunits. It gets the readers or the viewers as the case might be hooked.

Truth and objectivity be damned.

But for the brutality involved the Neeraj Grover murder story would be any other routine crime of passion story. It had to be invented if it was not there.