False Debates

In India, increasingly, the exception is the rule. In every sphere ofgovernance, we see a pervasive unwillingness to impose or abide by the law.National policies contribute directly to the rising anarchy across the country.Governments then seek to treat these self-inflicted wounds by providing fitfuland preferential relief to small and arbitrarily selected segments of theaffected population and, in this, compound existing injustice with furtherinequity. If anything, the consequences are made significantly worse by theinefficiency and corruption of the delivery mechanisms for the distribution ofthis purported 'relief'.

The contempt for the law is not limited to the state and its agencies, and tothose who exercise power through these. It extends to the overwhelming majorityof citizens who will ignore, if not actively breach, the law at almost everyinstance when they feel they are not being monitored and would not be liable topenalties. The internalisation of law and of accepted social norms and mores,the hallmark of civilised societies, is becoming increasingly rare, with oureducational systems, as well as the example of elders and the leaders ofsociety, failing comprehensively to encourage or inculcate any desirable valuesystem in our children.

While particular crimes occasionally engage the attention of the public andthe media, these sections are equally and vigorously exercised in seeking tosecure exceptions to the application of the law in 'special' cases, includingviolations by the power elite, in cases where violations are attributed to avariety of unsubstantiated 'root causes', as well as 'politically sensitive'cases — once again, arbitrarily defined.

More significant than the unwillingness reflected in our in capriciouspractices, is the incomprehension within the intelligentsia and ruling classesof the very notion of the rule of law and its role, not only in orderedadministration, but in democracy itself.

Democracy is not, as is widely believed, the mere establishment of anelectoral process and of consequent 'representative' governments that may do asthey please during their term in office (though this is, in fact, what democracyhas been reduced to in India). The electoral process is more fundamentally, themeans to establish a 'representative' legislature that is intended to frame lawsthat are in conformity with the will of the people — which laws the governmentand its various institutions and agencies are then required to implement withoutbias or discrimination, and with complete even-handedness.

The degree to which India's present legislatures — at the centre and in thestates — ignore or deal in the most perfunctory manner with legislativebusiness, and the extent to which our laws are far behind the imperatives of arapidly transforming age, are indices of the failure of Indian democracy. Thefact that a large proportion of the current Lok Sabha and of the many StateLegislatures comprises individuals with records of heinous crimes against themunderlines the reality of the national contempt for law.

Politics, in fact, has become the ultimate ambition of all successfulcriminals, because it is in political success that they can effectively wipe outthe entire record of past wrongdoing and secure absolute immunity againstpunishment. Their ambitions have, moreover, been eagerly encouraged and embracedby ideologically bankrupt political parties across the board, who have competedto give election tickets to the worst of offenders and justified the presence ofcriminals in Parliament and in State Legislatures on the grounds that the'popular will' was a 'higher law' than the statute book and the Constitution.But this argument is, in fact, the ultimate repudiation of the purpose andspirit of democracy, of which the central and guiding principle demands that noone be placed above the law.

There are many false debates in this country, tracing its many ills to avariety of 'root causes', seeking solutions in whimsical notions of welfare,selective protectionism and 'secularism' which provide little relief to theirtarget populations, but give rise to widespread resentment and allegations ofcorruption, inefficiency and 'appeasement'. What the country needs, forinstance, is not 'secularism'; it is simple rule of law. Secularism is part ofthe state's legal and constitutional obligation and would be automaticallyguaranteed by an even-handed application of the law.

The Constitution has imposed certain obligations and duties on the state,guarantees for people of all faiths alike, without discrimination of caste,creed, class or gender. It is the failure of the state to deliver on the promiseof the Constitution and the mandate of the nation's laws that has created thepersistent and insidious inequalities, which are then exploited by unscrupulouspoliticians and parties for, communal and caste mobilisation. Crucially, decadesof these process of communal and caste mobilisation have failed to empower theirtarget communities or to deliver any benefits of development to thesepopulations. They have, on the other hand, polarised communities, and lentlegitimacy to other unproductive and violent ideologies of envy and hate—including the rampaging Islamist, Maoist and ethnic (tribal) fundamentalistmovements across the country.

Similarly, it is the arbitrary exemptions from the law provided to theprivileged or to certain politically volatile— often violent— sections amongthe less privileged that are the basis of the widespread sense of injustice, andof the collapse of the authority and legitimacy of the justice system, and wouldbe more correctly identified as the 'root cause' of the pervasive sense ofinjury than any other failure of the state. Yet, we are constantly told, that wemust create even more exceptions to the application of the law to accommodatethese forces of violent disruption in order to address this sense of injury.

Recent reports suggest that a leading management institute in the countrydeclined to conduct courses in administrative practices for legislators in Biharon the grounds that they were uneducable. Far more productive than courses inadministration, however, would be courses and training in democracy, itsunderlying ideology, an understanding of the Indian Constitutional system andthe dynamics of a policy and legislative framework that is in conformity withthe Constitutional mandate. Had the political leadership evolved even a modicumof understanding of the nature of such a framework, the rising disorders andtheir increasingly vocal justifications would not find their source in the heartof India's establishment and structure of national power.

K.P.S.Gill is a former Punjab DGP and is currently advisor to theChhattisgarh government on Naxalite affairs. This piece first appeared in the Pioneer