Behind NDTV's Campaign For Jessica Lal

This is an excerpt from Sonia Singh's chapter in a new book about NDTV and 25 years of television journalism, called More News is Good News. Pre-order your copy on Amazon now. 

Seven years earlier, a young woman, Jessica Lal, had been shot point-blank with a bullet to her forehead. Already the travesty of justice had been front-page news; a judge letting go the man, Manu Sharma, son of a Haryana Congress minister, who had shot Jessica in a crowded nightclub, surrounded by witnesses, because she refused to serve him a drink after the bar had shut. The reason: a complete fabrication of ballistic reports plus witness after witness turning hostile. It seemed clear that the well-meaning outrage would ultimately vent itself in editorials and the matter would end there. 

Why should it? we questioned. My colleagues and I felt very strongly that there had to be some way to address an injustice which summed up in so many ways the collapse of a system. How the intersection of many factors - power, wealth, pliable investigators, judicial delays had all collectively contributed to a verdict which, as a newspaper headline said, meant that no one killed Jessica. What it added up to was we all killed Jessica by letting justice die the way it did. However, going to the president or spearheading any sort of campaign for this young woman would be a tectonic shift in our journalism; for a change, we would have to step away from being impartial observers. Usually as journalists, we track legal twists and turns, accept a court verdict as final, follow the progress of appeals (if they are filed at all) at a snail's pace. Yet, with the police in the dock as culpable for the botch-up and faced with fabricated evidence, there was no way this case could have a different verdict. 

So, yes, the president could well be our only hope, Thank You, Mr Commissioner, for that idea. President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, known as the People's President, seemed like the kind of person not bogged down by bureaucracy, someone who might be receptive to actually receiving a petition asking for a fresh investigation and retrial. The big challenge now was how to get the numbers needed to convince India's first citizen to even consider meeting us. Remember, this was the era BT (Before Twitter), all of us dinosaurs communicated via SMS-es and that seemed the fastest way to gather a critical mass of people in the shortest possible time. An SMS campaign. 

Now came the tough part: convincing my boss, Radhika Roy, my mentor and the editorial compass of NDTV who believed fiercely in journalism being non-partisan; never ever taking sides was her mantra. With some degree of trepidation, I made the call, and pitched it in a jumble of words, 'Radhika, I want to do an SMS campaign to get justice for Jessica, and take it to the president. I know it's never been done before, but it is the right thing to do.' Silence and then within thirty seconds, 'Yes, go ahead, Sonia.' 

The most crucial consent, however, still had to come, that of Jessica's family. May Lal, Jessica's mother, had died in 2000; her father, Ajit Lal, had died in 2006, still waiting for a verdict in the years after her murder. Her younger sister, Sabrina, still lived in Delhi, but as she told me on the phone, she had stopped even going for the hearings, in despair at the delays and legal machinations. The accused, Manu Sharma, could afford the best private lawyers while the victim's family wasn't even a party to the case; they were forced to rely on an overloaded public prosecutor. So it was not very surprising to note that Sabrina didn't seem very hopeful when I rang up, asking for her permission; in fact, she was almost resigned that nothing would change. We got her approval, though, and that was essential before we went ahead. 

Within ten minutes, we had a placard on air, the title was simple: Justice for Jessica, with details of the campaign we'd take to the president. We also wanted a visual expression of the deep, deep outrage over this. Candles at India Gate, someone said. Let's add to the placard that if you support this you can join us at India Gate. Why just Delhi, another editor suggested, the case has touched a chord in urban India, let's do it in all the major cities. We weren't sure how many people would actually turn up, given our notorious lethargy but, chalo, this was India, we were sure at least four or five people would gather seeing a camera. 

We would be on air with this at 6 p.m. and I prayed silently. We would have to do more than just vent our angst. I moved on to other news breaking in the 24/7 news cycle of the day, yet my mind kept going back to Jessica as the clock hands moved closer to 6 p.m. 

At around 5 p.m., I got a call from Prannoy. 'What is this campaign? I have people calling from Sri Lanka asking how do they SMS their support.'