Maria Susairaj (needs no introduction, does she?) has walked out free, with law and a smiling god by her side and as I write this, she has zoomed off to the airport in a swanky tourist car with police security, to possibly fly into the Bangalore sunset.

This after being accused of destruction of evidence, in this case, a body chopped in hundreds of pieces. Of a man she knew well. In a scene straight out of an Anurag Kashyap film, she and her fiance did not just collaborate on a murder of Neeraj Grover. They made a macabre ritual out of getting rid of his body.

 The Bangalore breeze that Maria seems to have longed for in her three year incarceration, on the other hand was laced with a certain irony yesterday, as a journalist friend pointed out. While Maria walked free even after disposing off a living person in the most dehumanising manner, green activists on a vigil to protect trees on Sankey Road were dragged off by the police and put behind bars.

 They were later released but you get the point. Law is not what it is made out to be in India and we all know that. That is why ministers and sons of ministers, even if they happen to be graft veterans and murderers  get to socialise over tea and stroll in gardens inside jails. That is why the Nithari case trudges on, pinning the most amount of blame on a servant while the master of the house of horrors is made out to be a witless innocent. 

 That is why ministers accused of mass murder during 1984 and  the Gujarat riots either are in power or using political clout to stay out of jail.

That is why rapes are everyday events in UP and a deputy chief medical officer like YS Sachan is murdered in the precincts of Lucknow district jail. That is why after arresting the green activists in Bangalore, the police returned after midnight to Sankey Road so that the tree cutters could chop down more trees under police protection.

 Be it the Maria Susairaj case or cases of wilful tree chopping, land acquisitions, rape cover ups and the cast based pogroms that leave behind the dead and the living without a sense of just closure,  law enforcement in India is becoming increasingly ineffective and lawless.

Maria Susairaj’s aquittal shows us not just how justice is miscarried at times but also that perhaps the urban young in unsparing cities, with no obvious propensity towards violence, can in the heat of the moment, kill randomly without any spasms of conscience. Are we raising kids to focus so much on success and self-appeasement that somehow words like personal accountability and introspection have been left out of their vocabulary?

 A film like Bejoy Nambiar’s Shaitan aspires to be a cult, youth film because it shows young people caught up in random acts of violence. That is why Ramgopal Varma is shortly releasing Not A Love Story, a stab by stab account of the Neeraj Grover murder case, hoping that the curiosity and disgust the actual crime has evoked will bring in the audience to watch its cinematic version. Meenal Bhagel, who has penned Death in Mumbai, a book on the Susairaj case, recently said in an interview that the crime really is the story of young India.

And it is very likely that Maria Susairaj will become a poster girl for ‘dangerous’ feminine sexuality which if unleashed can have devastating effect on society because you see, it was lust and murderous jealousy that caused her fiance to murder the man she was supposedly in a relationship of convenience with.

In an openly sexist society where baby girls are murdered, women raped, eve teased, burnt for dowry, disfigured with acid and killed in the name of honour, Maria will be held up as an example of why women must not be given too much freedom.

 Recently, a young woman who was “tested” for loyalty on a TV show was held up as something of a shocking example of the unthinkable when it was discovered that she had three boyfriends and had no moral qualms about dating them because she wanted to “live and enjoy” her life. The men on the show in similar situations have never evoked the kind of reaction she did because she was a woman and women were not supposed to do such things.

 What must be addressed though is that even if urban women are slowly but surely experimenting with casual sex, a woman’s sexuality in India is by and large a commodity to be disposed off safely by her parents to a man of their choice. In Haryana and Punjab, many couples have been killed for choosing love over honour. The Khap elders when interviewed have openly said that they have no regrets because honour is bigger than filial bonds. In small towns, young couples caught holding hands in gardens have been beaten, their faces blackened by police men and women in their zeal to impose a one-size-fits-all morality code. In a Mangalore pub, we all know, how women were humiliated and assaulted by a lunatic group.

 The proposed Slut Walk in Delhi also evoked mixed responses from both men and women, some of whom felt that women must dress ‘appropriately’ if they don’t want unwelcome attention.

But the Neeraj Grover murder case is not about gender politics. About women vs society. It is a story of a certain percentage of a mixed up generation that wants everything at any cost and is willing to give and receive sexual favours. That treats casual sex casually, lives for the moment and if driven to a certain point, can kill.

Also, Maria Susairaj may have walked free after a murder but there are millions of women in India who cannot even board a bus or walk on a road in the evening, without the fear of being targetted for supposedly being a weaker gender. 

 In our obsession with this one gory story, lets please not forget that there is another India, where girls have to fight for education, love, dignity, the right to say NO, to work and sometimes to live. Where couples are hounded to death by their own families. And sons and daughters of rikshaw pullers and daily wage workers somehow find enough fire in their core, to top competitive exams, win medals in international arenas and show us that our young are not just the expletive spewing stars we see in films or the drunk drivers and murderers we see in news headlines. There is another India aspiring for the freedoms we all take for granted and occasionally abuse.

Reema Moudgil is the author of  Perfect Eight (http://www.flipkart.com/b/books/perfect-eight-reema-moudgil-book-9380032870?affid=unboxedwri )