Sobering Truth

The death of Zubeen Garg, Assam’s most beloved musical son, was always destined to become more than a personal tragedy. In a region where celebrity, politics and grievance frequently blur, his drowning off Singapore’s Lazarus Island last September was swiftly recast as something more sinister in form of a murder plot and a betrayal. The Assam government’s Special Investigation Team (SIT) obliged the mood, filing a mammoth 12,000-page charge sheet accusing organisers, managers, security staff and Garg’s cousin of criminal conspiracy and murder. Five people now sit in jail following Garg’s death.

Yet the cold, clinical testimony now emerging in a Singapore coroner’s court tells a very different story which is far more banal. According to this, Garg was not pushed, drugged or attacked. He was dangerously drunk on a pleasure yacht with friends and colleagues.

His blood-alcohol level was 333 milligrams per 100 millilitres, more than four times Singapore’s legal driving limit and squarely in the range of severe intoxication, marked by impaired coordination, judgment and reflexes. While he initially wore a life jacket, he later removed it. Offered a second one when he went back into the water, he declined. He swam alone towards Lazarus Island, went limp, floated face-down, and drowned.

Investigators have ruled out any sign of assault. The injuries on his body came from frantic attempts to revive him. Medications for epilepsy and hypertension were found in his blood. The Singapore police, quite clearly, do not suspect foul play. The cause of death, the autopsy concluded, was drowning.

But in Assam, the SIT has built a case premised on murder and conspiracy, even as Singapore’s investigators have found no such thing. One may admire the emotional impulse behind the SIT’s zeal that Garg was a cultural icon, and grief seeks someone to blame. But criminal law is not meant to be an instrument of collective catharsis.

What, then, of those arrested? The evidence so far suggests not villains but bystanders to a catastrophe born of recklessness. Murder requires intent or at least knowledge that death is likely. What emerges from the Singapore inquiry is not intent but misadventure.

The political afterlife of Garg’s death in Assam has been less dignified. In a state where institutions are often bent by populism, the SIT’s sprawling charge sheet looks less like a careful prosecution and more like an attempt to keep alive a narrative that the facts no longer sustain. The inclusion of family members, bandmates and security staff smacks of dragnet justice.

None of this diminishes Garg’s loss, nor the pain of those who loved him. But grief does not license the invention of crimes. Assam’s authorities should take note. If the final findings confirm what has already been placed on the record, the arrested should not merely be acquitted. They should be released promptly, with apologies. The truth, in this case, seems sobering and far more banal.