India 360: Whistleblowers needed

THE ANSWER IS BLOWIN' IN THE WIND: Experts discuss if whistleblowers get a raw deal.

        

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“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

This famous saying by the British statesman-philosopher Edmund Burke rang true on a day when justice was delivered in the two-year-old Manjunath murder case.

Twenty-seven-year-old Manjunath Shanmugam - a marketing engineer with Indian Oil Corporation – was killed two years ago for blowing the lid off Uttar Pradesh’s oil mafia operating in the Lakhimpur-Kheri district.

While Manjunath paid with his life for being honest, his death was avenged in a judgement that will go down the history of judicial activism as being delivered after a sustained campaign by people who refused to give up on the system.

The big questions, the lookaheads

And as the crusaders for justice solemnly hailed the verdict, CNN-IBN discussed three crucial questions pertaining to the case on the show India 360, conducted by Sagarika Ghose.

• Will the Manjunath case become a model for the criminal justice system?

• Justice for Manjunath was a campaign taken forward on the Internet and by the believers of RTI. Did Manjunath's friends from IIM become soldiers for justice?

• And most importantly, politicians say a whistleblower act is the need of the hour. But is it possible to physically protect every young idealist like Manjunath and Satyendra Dubey? (an engineer allegedly killed for exposing corruption in the multi-crore Golden Quadrilateral project)

The show began with an emotional Shanmugam expressing his satisfaction with the verdict and thanking the crusaders of justice. He said India needed more people like his “honest” son. “I was very happy after hearing of the justice being done. Youngsters should take Manjunath as role model and be honest to their jobs by not taking bribes. That’s what my son used to do. He never accepted any money. They used to give bundles of money, but he threw it away.”

System works, after all

The Justice for Manjunath campaign was kickstarted by a group of IIM-Lucknow students after they heard of their colleague’s life being snuffed out in a gruesome manner.