The powerful get prosecutors; the farmers get funerals: five years of impunity at Lakhimpur

Five years after an SUV linked to a Union minister's son mowed down farmers at Lakhimpur Kheri, the Indian state cannot even find a competent prosecutor for the trial. That single fact tells you everything about who this system serves. On September 22, the Supreme Court had to ask the Uttar Pradesh government to respond to a plea for a senior public prosecutor with greater experience - because the complainants, through advocate Prashant Bhushan, raised concerns about the conduct of the newly appointed trial judge and the prosecutor, particularly regarding key eyewitnesses. Read that again: the victims' side has to beg the highest court for a prosecutor who is merely competent. The accused's side needed no such help. Ashish Mishra, son of then Union Minister Ajay Mishra, has watched the machinery of justice move around him with the gentle patience of a glacier. Now set that against Punjab. There, the Chief Minister's Officer on Special Duty was accused of running a transfer-posting racket - cash for IAS and IPS postings, tenders, confidential documents - and the Punjab Police sat on the Enforcement Directorate's letters for months. Only the High Court ordering a CBI probe moved the file. The powerful get protection; the powerless get process. Periyar asked the only question that matters: whom does power serve? At Lakhimpur, the answer drove an SUV through a crowd of farmers. In Chennai this week, the answer detained nurses who were invited for talks. In Punjab, the answer suspended the MLA who wept for empty classrooms while protecting the aide who sold postings. The pattern is not a coincidence; it is a design. Anna warned that democracy strangled by paperwork is still strangulation. Five years of paperwork at Lakhimpur - changed judges, questioned prosecutors, sealed-cover reports - is the paperwork of impunity. The system does not need to acquit the powerful. It only needs to outlast the victims. The candle marches on the anniversary are therefore not nostalgia. They are an act of defiance against forgetting - the one weapon the powerless still hold. Memory is the court where the powerful cannot file a transfer petition. Justice at Lakhimpur will not come from the system's conscience. It will come only when the cost of delay exceeds the comfort of impunity. Until then, the farmers march, the candles burn, and the state keeps looking for a prosecutor - any prosecutor - willing to do the job.