Heinrich Heine wrote: “Where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people.”

Close on the heels of that truism is another: If we lose touch with due process and do not assume innocence till guilt is proven we are doomed to injustice.

And so on this canvas let’s take the horror of the ‘Mukherjee murder’ case and the death of a young girl called Sheena Bora, a mystery in an enigma that has become India’s sordid cause celebre. More media coverage has been given this killing than the next five issues of importance collectively. Over 1 million manhours of TV and 10 billion manhours of enrapt viewing are but a very low estimate.

Let the killers be brought to court and punished with full severity. I am all for that. The young girl deserves justice in full measure.

But till the evidence is in there has to be some sanctity accorded to the constitutional right of every Indian to be protected by the law from the vigilantism and self propulsion of the public. The lack of procedure and ethics that marks the investigative process is breathtaking.

While former friends and colleagues are rushing like lemmings off the cliff of basic decency and breaking confidences on multiple TV channels in what is a travesty of Indian upper class society (using the word ‘class’ loosely) and the dubious adhesive that binds it, they can be pardoned for sheer bad manners and rancid narcissism. Clearly, they are only interested in projecting themselves and the subject, be it cabbages, kings or carnage, is purely incidental in this desperate need to be seen on the screen.

The same cannot be said for professionals. They do not have the luxury of concealing their spite.

I watch with slack jawed ‘admiration’ as a psychiatrist cheerfully comes on a TV talk show and shares memories of the accused, Indrani Mukherjee. She then proceeds to tell the world that Indrani wanted a false medical certificate but does not explain why she maintained her silence on a possible fraud or is breaking patient-doctor confidentiality without the slightest tremor in her conscience.

On other channels we have half a dozen senior policemen, senior lawyers, all of them offering opinions without a thread of evidence to back them.

In the interim the brother of the murdered girl Mikhail announces that he was also drugged in a hotel room by Mumsy and managed to escape. He then concluded in a burst of incandescent brilliance that since Mum had tried to kill him once she would not do it again so why bother telling the cops that his drink was spiked. Cool.

The same brother sits between two police officials on an Indigo flight and they allow him to be interviewed by a TV channel. Either he is in custody in which case he should be disallowed from speaking to the media or he is a free man in which case he should not be bookended by two cops on a public flight.

And did it not strike Indigo that interviewing someone in a murder trial on a flight is an imposition on other passengers who may exercise their right to say, hello ,this is not part of the deal.

Let’s examine how media has so thwarted the investigation and pied pipered even the investigation representatives into its visual trap. Come on TV and say your piece and if it messes things up the devil take the hind leg. Even the removal of the Commissioner of police from the case in the morning on Tuesday and his reinstatement the same evening makes for the perfect defense and any lawyer worth his salt will call it a botched investigation.

The leader of the TV feeding frenzy labels Indrani an evil woman. He stresses this trait several times. Based on what? Her arrest? The fact that she is a suspect? His clones on other channels follow him with gusto. Since there is no use of the escape hatch tag ‘alleged’ they are technically open to charges of libel.

Incessantly for the past several days all Indian news channels and their pigeons in the hole ‘debates’ have concentrated on this murder.

For the lawyer who finally takes Indrani as his client all this is super stuff and forms a concrete basis for declaring a mistrial on grounds of extreme prejudice and the fact that she will not get a fair trial because the Press has already indicted her. What can be more laughable than a suitcase found in Peter’s garage that has been lying there to accommodate Mikhail’s body when he finally murdered. The other suitcase was allegedly used for the sister. Five days after the arrest the incriminating suitcase is still in the garage! At present there is no forensic evidence to link Indrani to the murder. So, for all intents and purposes she is innocent despite her accusers now crawling out of the woodwork.

Legally, all the statements and character references are in the public domain and they can be used as admissible proof of that prejudice. The psychiatrist, the celebrities who are shooting off at the mouth, the supercop, the lawyer and the editor of a website who purports to recall her conversation with Indrani, can all be summoned as material witnesses in the case.

This is not a chat show. All these people have to explain why they were silent on any aspect of the life of Indrani Mukherjee for up to a decade and that makes them accessories before the fact.

Any smart lawyer will eat them for breakfast.

Take for example well known writer Vir Sanghvi’s statement made on TV that Indrani Mukherjee confided in him that she was raped by her father and suffers from the shock waves even to this day. To many folks Vir’s comments may be seen as gratuitous and distasteful because he breaches a confidence. But wittingly or otherwise he has provided the foundation for a defense that is vigorous and valid.

Who tells the media all these details almost in real time? We are told they are on their way to Raigad or Mumbai or Delhi or whatever. By the time this case goes to trial the evidence will be so knotted, the link between the murder and the murderers made tenuous by time and the scene so contaminated for forensics that Indrani Mukherjee will stand a fair chance of dodging a legal bullet currently going straight toward her.

And there, Watson, lies the rub. Should media be allowed to second guess the law? Your call, because public opinion has been formed even before the curtain rises on the legal aspect.

After all, if the killer gets away be it on the head of fourth estate.