Book Review : The Tandoor Murder by Maxwell Pereira Rating ****

I saw this incident on TV in 1995. The television had entered cable TV era from age old Doordarshan and a dozen or so news channels catering to viewers ever hungry for hot news. The tandoor murder fed them well. Author have complete knowledge of the incident since he was himself a top cop involved directly in the case. The book is a thorough account of that infamous murder popularized by cable TV news era. The real story is quite small and straight forward caused the author a lot of pain to convert it into a commercial book. This causes the book to be unnecessarily lengthy with unnecessary details. The details of autopsy/postmortem is very dirty to read and unnecessary for a common non technical reader, but author had to do it to fill the book.

The case was quite straight forward, that a criminal politician killed his keep and police, judiciary, government spend crores of rupees just to prove it in court of law though they had truckload of evidence with them. What a tragedy and waste of hard earned public tax money. No wonder Sunny Deol shouts in the "Damini" movie court "Tarikh Pe Tarikh".  This book proves if you have money in your pocket you can buy everything in India and live happily even in Jail.

The story is quite one sided since the author himself was involved in the case and was a top cop, the story is biased on police side. He tries to save image of the police in the case. But unfortunately as per my personal experiences in India, the police are no better than criminal themselves. They use their power to extract money from everybody involved in the case by harassing them. No wonder their is a saying in India that Wise men never cross the steps of Police Station or Court. You can imagine condition of the casual witnesses of the crime who had to attend trial of the case for eight and half years at their own expenses by skipping their jobs. Even court forced them to give witness by claiming bond from them and issuing non bailable warrants incase they don't turn up in the court.

The book also highlights poor condition of Indian judiciary system which not only slow but corrupt. I don't understand, say if every individual in India of population around 1.5 billion peoples, decides to sue other Indian person, how many years will be taken to give justice to each of them. How already choked up prisons will accommodate them. Who will pay for their expenses in Jail. The time has come to expedite our justice system and hold judges accountable for wrong justices given and long time taken to deliver it. To take trials in 3 shifts, 24 x 7 with no holidays like one taken for full month in May.

The author have took a lot of pain to fill the pages of the book. The first part of the book is quite interesting but the courtroom drama is very boring and almost predictable since lot of us have already seen it all in lot of Hindi movies we have seen. The book lacks photos of the incident and involved people, which would have added value to the book. I have to rely on the internet to see faces of Sushil and Naina.

Author is a top cop and knows what goes inside the top rated jails like Tihar, still finds himself helpless to do anything. Even a top jailer like Kiran Bedi could not do anything to it. The jails like tihar are fully ruled by mafias. Police or jail authority have absolutely no control over them. The most affected peoples are raw inmates whose cases are pending. Many of them are innocent and trapped by criminals or police themselves. The movie "Jail" starred by actor Neil Nitin Mukesh shows true picture of Indian Jails. Overall the book is good for those interested in crime stories.