A drunken driving incident in Maharashtra’s Pune city that snuffed the life out of two brilliant software engineers in their early 20s is unfolding like a Hollywood script, like a river surprised by its own current.
A rich kid, just a few months short of what is considered adulthood in India, had just cleared his Class 12 exams. He took off in a ₹2.5 crore Porsche Taycan gifted to him by his seemingly progressive dad to celebrate with his friends. Undoubtedly high on booze, he was on his way back home – 160 kmph – when he rammed into a motorbike. The supercar, mangled by now, came to a halt a few hundred meters down the road.
The motorbike-borne duo – a boy and a girl, both 24-year-old techies, returning from a party – flung some 20-feet in the air before hitting vehicles parked nearby and then the tarmac. They're lying in a pool of blood, lifeless.
Aneesh Awadhiya and Ashwini Koshta, both natives of the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, are dead.
And for the 17-year-old kid who was behind the wheel of the Porsche Taycan, what started out as a celebration for clearing his Class 12 examinations has turned into a nightmare of epic proportions. To start with, onlookers and passersby start thrashing him mercilessly.
After the Juvenile Justice Board (JJB) granted the teenager bail following the fatal crash on conditions that involved writing a 300-word essay on road safety and 15 days of community service among others, a nationwide public outcry – reminiscent of the 1999 Jessica Lal murder and the 2012 Nirbhaya gangrape case – has snatched away his short-lived freedom.
The teenager’s high-profile realtor father was sent to two days’ police custody on May 22. Hours later, the JJB cancelled the minor’s bail and remanded him to a rehabilitation/observation home till June 5.
The public outrage over the incident had even prompted Maharashtra state’s Chief Minister Eknath Shinde and Home Minister Devendra Fadnavis to call out the JJB’s decision to grant bail to the accused on such “extremely lenient” grounds.
“The order of the JJB is shocking. We have filed a revision petition… I need not speak more on that,” Fadnavis had said on May 21.
Meanwhile, a second plea by the Pune Police to try the accused, who is only four months short of turning 18, as an adult is under consideration.
According to the amended law after the 2012 Nirbhaya gang rape in which a minor was involved, children aged 16 and 18 can be tried as adults if they have committed a heinous offense. But the offense, regardless of how heinous, can only attract a maximum punishment of seven years in an adult prison.
Per Section 15 of the JJ Act, when a child between the age of 16 and 18 has committed a heinous offense, the JJB will “conduct a preliminary assessment with regard to his/her mental and physical capacity to commit such offense, ability to understand the consequences of the offense and the circumstances in which he/she allegedly committed the offense.”
It is pretty clear that the battery of lawyers arguing on behalf of the deep-pocketed minor made a plea that the accused is an alcohol addict so as to build a case that, since alcoholism is considered a disease, the accused was not in his senses when the accident occurred.
But the police aren’t standing by and watching the high and mighty get away, at least not when the entire nation is watching; certainly not when the state’s top ministers have given them a “go-ahead.”
“We are not applying a case of 304(a) of the Indian Penal Code of drunken driving and a rash and negligent act. We are applying Section 304 (culpable homicide not amounting to murder), where we are saying that he had knowledge that his rash act – where he was driving a Porsche without a number plate at a rash speed on a narrow street after consuming alcohol – could cause or was likely to cause death,” Pune Police Commissioner Amitesh Kumar told NDTV.
The case has caught the public’s eye, not just in India, but elsewhere too.
“The kid? He’s almost 18 years old. Drunk and driving a Porsche? He should be tried as an adult and sentenced like an adult. The father, who gave him the keys to his car, should be jailed for the same amount of time,” Rowena Uppal, 43, a communications specialist in London, told Education Post.
Uppal was echoing pretty much the general Indian public’s sentiment – try the kid like an adult. After all, he’s only a couple of months shy of 18.
But before condemning the teenager (who cannot be named because he is a minor) to an entire life in oblivion – we need to answer a few questions to ourselves.
What if the car wasn’t a Porsche, but an ordinary car? What if the driver was not the son of an ultra-rich builder, but an ordinary man? What if the victims were not Aneesh Awadhiya and Ashwini Koshta, but street dwellers?
Would there still be so much outrage?
Drunk driving accidents happen almost every other day in India. What's so special about this one?
