I. The cry of the river
In Assam, we say the Brahmaputra listens.
It carries voices, murmurs, fragments of song.
Once, it carried Zubeen’s lyrics to fishermen, rickshaw-pullers, and young dreamers by the banks.
Now, it carries the murmurs of disbelief.
People gather by the riverside, candle in hand, and whisper:
“Why him? How?”
Their grief is unstructured, raw yet it carries an ethical demand.
For what Sen calls the removal of manifest injustice.
When something plainly wrong stares at us like neglect, secrecy, confusion we must not wait for the ideal conditions of justice;
we must act to reduce the wrongs before us.
The people of Assam are doing precisely that.
Their protests are not anarchic; they are, in the deepest sense, moral acts.
They are saying: we do not know the full truth, but we cannot accept the fog.
The fog itself is the injustice.
And to clear it through truth, transparency, and reason is the beginning of justice.
II. The ethics of knowing
Sen once wrote that justice cannot exist without public reasoning.
We do not arrive at truth in solitude; we argue, listen, disagree, and deliberate.
Justice grows, like the river, through movement and exchange.
But what happens when information is withheld,
when the narrative of a beloved’s death becomes a property of state bureaucracy?
When statements are delayed, records are hidden,
and the people who ask too much are told to wait?
Then, public reasoning collapses.
And with it, justice begins to erode.
For the family of Zubeen, not knowing is its own form of punishment.
For his listeners, uncertainty becomes a wound that cannot heal.
Sen would call this a deprivation of capability – the capability to grieve truthfully,
to know and thus to begin to heal.
When truth becomes a privilege rather than a right,
the promise of justice is already broken.
III. The difference between law and justice
Some say the law will take its course.
But what course does the law take, when guided by power rather than conscience?
Courts, police, and protocols, these are institutions, not virtues.
They can act lawfully and still fail to be just.
Justice, Sen insists, is not about perfect institutions;
it is about improving the world we can see and touch,
comparing the better with the worse, and choosing the better.
The point is not to build a utopia,
but to remove avoidable suffering when we can.
So the question is:
Which process today brings Assam closer to truth
a closed investigation that breeds suspicion,
or an open one that invites scrutiny?
Which response reduces suffering
a hurried conclusion or a transparent reckoning?
To demand accountability is not to disrespect authority.
It is to remind authority that it exists to serve the living truth, not the political theatre.
IV. The public’s right to feel
Zubeen’s songs were full of the earth, it possess the smell of rain, the ache of lovers,
the music of ordinary days.
His art belonged to everyone, not just to fans but to the very rhythm of Assamese life.
When such a figure dies under confusion,
the public’s emotion is not mere sentimentality; it is civic participation.
To light a candle is to insist that grief deserves light.
To march in protest is to insist that silence is not acceptable.
To write, sing, question, all these are forms of what Sen calls public reasoning.
A community’s collective moral voice is the soil from which justice grows.
And yet, in our times, every protest risks being branded political,
every question turned into accusation,
every mourner told to move on.
But democracy, as Sen reminds us, is not only about voting.
It is about argument, it is about the freedom to reason together about the good life.
If Assam cannot reason together about what happened to its most beloved artist,
then something larger than one life has been lost.
V. Justice as the ability to mourn
When Sen speaks of capability, he speaks of freedom not merely to act, but to be.
The freedom to live the life one has reason to value.
Justice, then, is not only about distributing punishment;
it is also about enabling lives to flourish.
In the aftermath of Zubeen’s death,
the question is whether his family, his community, and his listeners
have the freedom to mourn meaningfully, to know, to remember, to sing again.
Grief without truth is imprisonment.
Justice must first free grief.
To do so, the state must open its doors:
share medical findings transparently,
cooperate with Singaporean authorities without pride or hesitation,
protect witnesses and medical staff who speak,
and keep politics at bay.
Because to politicize a death is to kill memory twice.
VI. The danger of symbolic closure
The media has its own appetite for closure.
A few arrests, a formal statement, a promise of inquiry
and soon, headlines move on.
But justice is not a headline; it is a horizon.
Sen warns against mistaking symbols for substance.
The unveiling of statues, the rhetoric of condolence, the televised sympathy
these can console, but they cannot heal.
Justice asks for something more laborious, less visible:
the courage to persist in truth-seeking long after attention fades.
Symbolic closure silences grief prematurely.
It tells the people, “you have mourned enough.”
But grief, like truth, refuses to be scheduled.
If we want justice for Zubeen,
we must allow mourning to complete its natural course,
guided by truth, not convenience.
VII. Comparative hope: choosing better paths
Sen would ask:
Of the paths available, which reduces suffering most?
Which expands our capability to know, to grieve, to trust?
Perhaps the investigation led by the Assam CID may need to open itself
to cross-border collaboration with Singaporean medical authorities.
Perhaps independent experts viz. legal, forensic, ethical
must be included to avoid suspicion of bias.
Perhaps the family must be informed at every step,
and the public given periodic updates, not as gossip,
but as a matter of collective dignity.
Justice, after all, is not the monopoly of the state;
it is the conversation between the state and its citizens.
It is the river between governance and grief.
VIII. The cultural dimension of justice
Assam’s soul has always been musical.
Zubeen’s voice stitched together fragments of its plural identity
Assamese, Bengali, Hindi, Nepali, English
each language braided with the rhythm of home.
In losing him, the state did not just lose a singer;
it lost a cultural institution, a vessel of memory.
Justice for Zubeen, therefore, must include justice for the arts.
To ensure that artists are cared for,
that their well-being, mental, physical, creative is treated as public good,
not private indulgence.
To ensure that art never again has to negotiate between devotion and neglect.
That artists can fall ill without falling into invisibility.
That the state remembers that those who make songs also make societies.
IX. The moral ecology of justice
Sen’s idea of nyaya, justice as lived experience,
not an imagined perfection
invites us to think of justice as ecology:
a delicate balance between truth, care, and freedom.
In Assam, that ecology feels disturbed.
Rumour competes with reason.
Grief competes with politics.
Justice competes with spectacle.
But amid that disarray, there are small acts of restoration
students holding vigils,
journalists refusing to sensationalize,
listeners replaying songs with quiet defiance.
Each act is a way of saying:
We will not let this grief be stolen.
That too is justice, it is the justice of memory.
X. Justice as song
In the end, perhaps justice, like music,
is something we approach but never fully possess.
It is not a verdict but a practice
a rhythm between truth and tenderness.
If the investigation is transparent,
if the family is treated with respect,
if the public is allowed to know,
if artists are safer tomorrow than yesterday
then we move a little closer to justice.
And if the river still carries his voice,
if his songs continue to echo in tea gardens and student hostels,
if his art remains a reminder that one can be both fragile and fearless
then Assam will have kept its promise.
Justice, after all, is not the silence after the song.
It is the song that rises from silence
the people’s chorus, seeking truth not to punish,
but to make meaning possible again.
Alankar Kaushik teaches media studies at EFL University, Shillong Campus and can be reached at +91-96129-51275 (akaushik@efluniversity.ac.in)
Mahabahu.com is an Online Magazine with collection of premium Assamese and English articles and posts with cultural base and modern thinking. You can send your articles to editor@mahabahu.com / editor@mahabahoo.com (For Assamese article, Unicode font is necessary) Images from different sources.
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