There are many things that need to be said about the Sushant Singh Rajput case—including, of course, the astonishing fact that the CBI was allowed to finally file a closure report confirming what all sensible people already knew: this was a suicide. The reason why it is astonishing is because the agency had completed its investigation years ago but had been made to delay its final report, leaving me to wonder if it would ever be allowed to close the case.
Here are the two most important things we need to remember.
One: We all know that protections for citizens are feeble in India. So feeble that if the system is out to get you then no matter how blameless your life has been, and how totally innocent you are, your very existence can be turned into a living hell.
On the whole, systemic persecution has been confined to politicians, activists, businessmen who can be squeezed for bribes, and journalists. But what the Sushant Singh Rajput case tells us is that this is no longer the case.
Now, nobody is immune to this kind of life-destroying persecution. If politicians think it suits their purposes, then they will ruin you and demolish your family’s happiness, regardless of whether you have kept your nose out of politics or not. In today’s India, no one is safe – not even an innocent bystander. We are totally at the mercy of cynical politicians and their conscience-less stooges.
And two: there was a time when the agents of this persecution were policemen and bureaucrats. Citizens could look to the judiciary or the media to recognise their innocence and offer them some relief.
That’s gone now. If the government wants to send you to jail on some trumped-up charge for which there is no real evidence (and which may eventually be dropped anyway), the judiciary will not stand up for your rights. It will do what the police wants, lock you up and all but throw away the key. If the authorities extend this mindless but malicious persecution to your family, the courts will be happy to go along with it and imprison your innocent relatives too.
Whipping up hysteria
The media used to stand up for citizens when the courts failed, and there seemed to be no other recourse. Now, the media is no more than an agent of the government, and part of a TRP-driven mob. If they can tell lies to please their political masters and also get high ratings by whipping up mass hysteria on the basis of these lies, then, for much of our media, that’s the perfect situation.
It’s become worse because of social media. The internet has fed and fuelled conspiracy theories that have been amplified on X, Facebook, and WhatsApp. These theories are manufactured for devious purposes and social media is manipulated into spreading them through bots and paid posts. Sadly, there are also real people who fall for this rubbish, turning these conspiracy theories into articles of faith.
All of this happened in the Sushant Singh Rajput case. The prime victims were Rhea Chakraborty and her family, though all of us were also victims. We saw how the last bits of the system that we still had faith in had turned into a writhing, rotting mass of deceit and iniquity. It was Rhea who suffered in that case. It can be you or me the next time.
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Manufactured victimhood
Why was the tragic suicide of Sushant Singh Rajput turned into a drugs and murder conspiracy that played out night after night on our TV screens and dominated our social media?
One obvious reason was political expediency. An assembly election was due in Bihar, and it suited politicians to portray Sushant as a victim – a bright Bihari boy who had been murdered by the apparently sophisticated but actually totally immoral people in the big city. As we have seen over the last decade or so, manufactured victimhood wins votes.
But there was a deeper motive, too. This was a time when the Sangh Parivar had declared war on Bollywood. All of the values that Hindi cinema had stood for, especially its status as India’s most secular industry, were under attack.
Part of this campaign was the characterisation of Bollywood as a decadent drug-addled place where the men were either Muslims or took drugs or both; were sex maniacs or deviants; ran the industry like a club where outsiders had to debase themselves to enter, and where any refusal to toe the line was met with excommunication or even death.
The women were as bad: they had loose morals, and if things did not go their way, turned into evil witches. It is significant that though much of the campaign against Rhea Chakraborty was based on misogyny, she was frequently described as a chudail who did black magic.
This may sound like a bizarre conspiracy view dreamt up by an ignorant village bumpkin who was envious of the glamour of Bollywood. But it was the prevailing view on TV channels and social media for over a year.
It didn’t end with Rhea either.
Sameer Wankhede, the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) officer assigned to lock Rhea up, was lionised by the media when he later jailed Shah Rukh Khan’s son without a shred of evidence. And though the case was so weak that the charges were dropped, many different judges refused to grant Aryan Khan bail for nearly a month.
Could it happen again? Did the bogus conspiracy theories only take off because we were all bored during the Covid-19 pandemic and happy to try and burn so-called witches to distract ourselves?
Well, yes, many things have changed since those days. The CBI has been allowed to say it was a suicide. The case against Rhea Chakraborty has wound down. Wankhede has been exiled to a nothing posting.
And nobody takes the TV channels seriously now. As the industrialist Harsh Goenka, an astute observer of the Indian media scene, said in an X post about the way news organisations handled the case: “For me, journalism died that day.”
Even the Sangh Parivar’s war on Bollywood is over, and it looks like the film industry has won. It is warier and more cautious now, but hostilities have ceased largely because the public never accepted that sinister characterisation of Bollywood.
The citizens of India, however, have lost the battle that matters: no one will stand up for our rights against a vengeful system. Not the courts. And certainly not the media.
That is the real tragedy.
Vir Sanghvi is a print and television journalist, and talk show host. He tweets @virsanghvi. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)