Street Verdict

Good riddance is not a phrase one should reach for lightly. The rule of law depends, after all, on restraint and on the dull but civilised belief that courts, not pistols, settle accounts. Yet when Aslam Shabbir Shaikh, better known as Bunty Jahagirdar, was gunned down in broad daylight in Shrirampur this week, few in Maharashtra’s political and policing circles sounded genuinely shocked. Fewer still sounded mournful. The public, for one, certainly couldn’t care.

Jahagirdar was not an accidental victim of random violence. He was an accused in the 2012 Jangli Maharaj Road bomb blasts in Pune, an attack that planted six explosive devices on one of the city’s busiest commercial arteries. Five exploded within minutes and only technical incompetence prevented mass casualties. The blasts were designed not merely to kill but to terrorise a prospering city.

That such a man was out on bail, riding back from a funeral in the middle of the afternoon, says much about India’s criminal-justice system. Jahagirdar was the son of a sitting NCP corporator, a reminder that politics in small-town Maharashtra is often a family business, and that muscle, money and ideology mix easily when institutions are weak.

His past was long and unsavoury. Police records link him to assisting a Pakistani spy in 2006, when maps, disks and classified documents were allegedly recovered. He was banished from Shrirampur more than once. Several criminal cases clung to him like burrs. More recently, he was said to have played a discreet role in local municipal politics, recently helping a cousin to victory.

Then came the end when two men on a motorcycle shot him in a crowded area. The assassins vanished after this clinical, Dhurandhar-style killing. It is tempting and emotionally satisfying to treat this as street justice when a dangerous man meets a violent fate. That said, vigilante outcomes corrode the very idea of justice, even when the victim is unsympathetic.

And yet, it is equally dishonest to pretend that Jahagirdar’s killing emerged from nowhere. It is the product of a system that allows terror accused to drift back into public life, that cannot conclude trials within a decade, and that tolerates the quiet reintegration of men with bloody pasts into local power structures. When the state abdicates its monopoly on decisive justice, others step in.

From Punjab’s gangland feuds to Uttar Pradesh’s strongmen-turned-leaders, India has normalised a twilight zone in which the accused oscillate between courtrooms and campaign offices. The state, overwhelmed or unwilling, substitutes processes with paralysis.

Maharashtra’s law-and-order problem is not that criminals die violently. It is that they live comfortably in between on bail, on influence and not least, on political patronage. The real scandal is not how Jahagirdar died, but how long he was allowed to matter at all. In such an ecosystem, contract killings seem like brutal and just corrections to citizens, who have long ceased to expect closure from courts.