The story of corporate lawyer Janhavi Gadkar allegedly killing two men in a taxi while she was driving her Audi drunkenly down the wrong side of a Mumbai highway is deeply tragic and troubling, in many different ways.

First and foremost, the fate of the two blameless victims - Mohd Salim Saboowala, aged 50, and the taxi’s driver Mohd Hussain Sayaed, aged 57 - is tragic without reservation. Indeed, the death of the sober who have done nothing wrong is tragic in every drink driving case (and even more tragic is the victim blaming by defence lawyers or supporters is rife, if almost universally condemned, in similar cases).

But if the events in the Gadkar case happened as they have been alleged, there certainly appears to be legal and moral culpability and the law should and hopefully will take its proper course.

However, in parallel a trial by media is taking place right now that has turned into a self-righteous witch hunt that will achieve little in making our roads safer.

People’s frustrations about the outcome of the Salman Khan case, who got bail immediately after having been pronounced guilty by a trial court after 13 years, and other cases similar to Khan’s that semi-regularly hit the headlines, have frictionlessly been transferred directly onto Gadkar.

Being human

I have never interacted with Gadkar, to the best of my knowledge, but Gadkar is presumably a normal and fallible human being, as the rest of us, and for some she is also presumably a former colleague or friend.

She has allegedly made at least one big mistake while in a state of severe inebriation, but morally, does that make her a monster?

She wouldn’t be the first or the last to have made a big mistake while drunk, and she wouldn’t by any means be the only one where such a mistake has cost lives.

Statistics from 2011 showed that 70 per cent of 1.34 lakh road accident fatalities in India were due to drunken driving.

That does not absolve Gadkar from blame, but just like every other drunken driver, she must be entitled to a fair trial no matter what she has allegedly done.

However, that’s not the narrative that’s currently the flavour of the week in the media, online and off.

De-human

Barkha Dutt tweeted acidly on Friday:

Janhvi Gadkar - Poor Little Rich Girl. You killed two people. All your money wont buy you the grit& grace of their families. Drink to that.

None of us know all the circumstances relating to this accident, despite heavy media coverage of minute detail after detail, in-part powered by unnamed police officials, as it so often is, who are eager to share details of their investigation and Gadkar’s statements given to them (presumably, in part, while she was still inebriated).

Reporters filled in the blanks with some good old-fashioned detective work (according to the Mumbai Mirror, she told cops that she had had two pegs of whiskey but the restaurant bill said she bought six small pegs, at Rs 502 plus taxes each; she allegedly told the lawyer friend she drank with “don’t worry, I have done this before”; the Mirror also ‘found out’ that she had not eaten after having drunk and the paper somehow established that she had drunk exactly 180ml of whiskey, 150ml above the legal limit).

So let me speculate and make some things up completely out of thin air about person X, that could absolve someone in a similar situation to her morally and/or legally to varying degrees.

Maybe X’s drink was spiked? Maybe a third party drank some of X’s drinks or the restaurant overbilled and she only had two pegs after all? Maybe the drink interacted in an unknown way with some medication X was taking? Maybe X is bipolar and was in the midst of a manic episode, causing X to take greater risks and drink to excess?

Or, maybe X simply made a very stupid mistake with terrible consequences for others.

The fact is that until there is a trial and she is proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt we don’t really know anything other than what the media is writing about it and what the police are telling us (who obviously have an incentive to showing off their drunk-driver-busting skills). There could be any of a hundred different reasons that could at least in-part excuse why someone in Gadkar’s or X’s position could have done what she allegedly did.

The impulse to drum up a media storm to ensure she does not ‘escape justice’ is strong but it is misplaced. Writing her off as an Untermensch is easiest, as it is to transfer our frustrations from the rich and famous who escape justice onto this “poor little rich girl”, quoting Dutt.

I don’t know who her family is or how rich or little she is at age 35, but working an upper-mid-level legal department job at Reliance Industries would likely place her amongst Bombay’s higher earners.

It is therefore a fact that she will be able to afford pretty decent defence lawyers, which is something that 90 per cent (if not 99 per cent) of people accused of a serious crime in India will never get access to.

But she is not a Salman Khan in any way other than her being more privileged than the average person. Like Khan she is also photogenic, which means newspapers will happily use her pictures on front pages.

Everyman

Gadkar, being so similar to many of the English-language media’s readers and viewer, has become a convenient but powerless stand-in for every single drunk driver who ever killed anyone, while also feeding into middle-class angst with the narrative of, “this could have been us or one of our friends”, and India’s righteous anger about the rich getting away with murder (which, frankly, they do every day).

But being privileged or a woman or being able to afford decent lawyers is not Gadkar’s fault either, and stereotyping her as a spoilt and entitled rich girl is despicable and reeks of sexism to boot.

“Instead of beer, I had two pegs of Ballantine’s whiskey for fun,” she reportedly told police, presumably while still drunk (it’s not clear if a lawyer was present while she allegedly said this).

That reported statement alone prompted plenty of ink to be spilled, including an opinion column in the Daily O, headlined “these women who drink whisky for fun”. It blamed “Jahnavi Gadkar, homicidal maniac of a drunken lawyer who killed an innocent father and a taxi driver”, for setting back women’s hard-won right to have “fun” (as “the headlines the day after scream ‘woman has whisky ‘for fun’ and kills innocents’”).

The subtext is that this woman has let the side down by daring to make the same mistake that lakhs of men and other women make every year, and should be blamed for the next day’s sensationalist headlines too.

“Another drunk-driving accident: Why do Indians think that the laws are for someone else?” read a Scroll.in headline to an article that dealt largely in what-ifs about how Gadkar’s could have avoided doing what she allegedly did.

Unfortunately the ‘Indian psyche’ is practically unlikely to be a major cause of people drunk driving.

In the USA, drunk driving contributed to 31 per cent of all 10,076 traffic deaths in 2013, and it and other Western countries have mostly managed to cut their drunk driving death rates with a mix of stricter enforcement, public awareness campaigns and public attitudes towards drunk driving.

India’s problem will lie with all of these, but mostly with the fact that a law, which is not properly enforced, becomes a law that loses its power.

The role that law enforcement plays in all this is central. The fact is that particularly in places like Mumbai or Delhi, driving while having drunk a drink or two or three is worryingly commonplace.

The insidious thing with booze is that the more of it you have, the more confident you’ll (wrongly) feel that you are sober enough to drive home.

On top of that, the drunker you are, the more confident you’ll become that should the police catch you, all you need to do is flash your advocate’s or press card to get you off (in most cities).

And if that doesn’t work, your slight inebriation is probably nothing that a few hundred Rupees for the friendly neighbourhood cop won’t fix.

So rather than demonising one woman who has allegedly made one very big mistake that she is certain to regret for the rest of her life and that many other people make every night, we should be focusing our energies on fixing ineffective policing and enforcement of our laws, as well as our judicial system so it does not take 13 years or longer to get some half-hearted versions justice.

Let’s get something clear: roasting Gadkar in the nine circles of hell on Twitter, in talk shows or in opinion columns, is not a public awareness campaign; it is first and foremost about feeding an outrage industry.

And whoever is the target of the week for such outrage will quickly be forgotten and replaced by another, equally easy target next week, while the real problems remain unsolved, and as that cycle goes on, more lives will continue to be tragically lost to drunk driving again, week after week, night after night.