Justice Has a Price Tag and Farmers Can’t Afford the Subscription
February 2025. Three phone calls. Salman Khan. Akshay Kumar. Sonu Sood. Within 72 hours, Rs 3.5 crore materializes, and Rajpal Yadav walks free from Tihar Jail after barely 11 days his Rs 9 crore cheque bounce conviction suspended until March 2026. The machinery of celebrity justice, oiled by viral campaigns and Bollywood’s fraternity fund, moves with surgical precision.
Now ask yourself: what machinery exists for the farmer hanging from a ceiling beam in rural Maharashtra?
The National Crime Records Bureau doesn’t soften the answer 10,677 farmers chose suicide over debt in 2023 alone. Not because they were criminals. Because the same Section 138 of the Negotiable Instruments Act that granted Yadav a second chance handed them a death sentence, delivered through bank notices, crop failures, and Rs 27 daily wages that couldn’t service Rs 50,000 loans.
The arithmetic is unspoken but damning. Yadav’s timeline: 2010 default, 2018 conviction, 2025 celebrity bailout fifteen years of legal elasticity with zero permanent consequences. A farmer’s timeline: monsoon failure, bank notice, ninety days, suicide note. One bad season. One permanent solution. This isn’t coincidence. This is architecture.
Consider S. Murugan, a Chennai textile trader who built a Rs 2 crore business across two decades. A market crash, cheque bounce charges, recovery agents at his door daily. His suicide note asked: “Why do they forgive crores for film losses but hound me for lakhs in business losses?” No Bollywood star retweeted his plight. No crowdfunding campaign. Just a widow and dusty prosecution files.
The mechanism deserves scrutiny. When Yadav deposited Rs 1.5 crore — merely 17% of his total debt — courts granted suspension. Legal? Absolutely. But Tamil Nadu farmer Vellaiyan deposited Rs 1.2 lakh in 2022, representing 31% of his agricultural loan a higher percentage than Yadav’s. Banks refused settlement and demanded full repayment with 18% compound interest. He consumed pesticide on his land. Identical legal principle. Asymmetric outcome. By design.
Article 14 of the Indian Constitution promises equality before the law. The data exposes it as performance. Delhi High Court records from 2018-2024 reveal that celebrity defendants in Rs 1 crore-plus NI Act cases resolve in an average 4.2 years. Non-celebrity defendants in sub-Rs 10 lakh cases wait 7.8 years and 68% below the poverty line never reach resolution at all, ending cases through death or destitution. Justice isn’t blind. She’s checking follower counts.
The irony cuts deeper still. India abolished jury trials in 1973 fearing media manipulation of verdicts. Today, celebrity defendants generate 4.7 million social media impressions in 48 hours to create implicit judicial pressure. We eliminated populism only to birth privilege.
Meanwhile, the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana carried Rs 5,900 crore in unclaimed insurance as of 2023 while farmers died waiting for Rs 50,000 claims. Between 2014 and 2023, corporate bad loans worth Rs 10.09 lakh crore were written off by banks. Agricultural debt relief in the same period totalled Rs 2.7 lakh crore, serving fifty times more borrowers at one-fourth the relief.
Rajpal Yadav is not the villain he is the symptom. The disease is a justice system that calibrates mercy to media reach. Until Section 138 is enforced with identical velocity regardless of fame, Article 14 remains India’s most elaborate constitutional fiction.
The question was never why celebrities get bailouts. It is why farmers never get phone calls.
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