The Rights And Privileges Of Mr. Peeping Tom

It was the queer nature of the Attorney General's argument in the apex court, in the Aadhar validity case, that first provoked this startled mind to mimic Alice in Wonderland: "Why, you don't even know what they're about!"

The AG's argument is quite extraordinary — that the Indian citizenry has enjoyed a non-existent right all the while; right to privacy has never found mention in our constitution! In other words free India had no right to any privacy. The mind goes into fresh convulsions and like in a surrealistic dream it begins to wonder what would happen if citizens are stripped off their privacy rights. Kind of a bare-all-world it would be!

Even God did not come up with such clever reasoning when he encountered Adam and Eve ridiculously draped in fig leaves for the first time since creation. Interestingly, their first act was to cover up after eating the forbidden fruit! Since then privacy has been a given, an unwritten etiquette, an inviolable space that came with its own Lakshman rekha.

Even our founding fathers never thought they had to spell that out distinctly and separately as our culture comes with its own privacy code. Ah, well, they should have known better because, here comes this legal idea which asserts that the state has the right to peek into people's snail mails, e-mails, banking details, gassing details, potty details and look at us in the altogether.

Of course, the state also wishes to step beyond and look into our DNA makeup that is nestled deep in our cells (DNA profiling bill is now in Parliament). Curiouser and Curiouser, we will soon find ourselves in a strange land where our personal details will be official state secrets while we know little about our own selves.

An odd corollary to all this argument and counter-argument is that it gives certain undue rights and privileges that have been long denied to that half crazed dim-wit who has been up to no good: Mr Peeping Tom. The strange logic of the AG reveals that the state wants to step right into Mr Tom's elevated shoes (Mr Tom likes to perch on ledges, treetops, parapets for a better view) and ape his ritualistic habits.

Legend has it that Mr Peeping Tom was moonlighting as a tailor in eleventh century England. Lady Godiva of Coventry, distraught by the high taxes levied on the poor townsfolk by her husband, begs him to lower them. He finally agrees on condition that she rides through the town stark naked. It was decided that everyone in the town would down their shutters and avert their eyes as she rode through at noon. But Tom the tailor peeks at Lady Godiva and his actions receive censure from the folks and a permanent honorific to boot. Grose's Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, 1796, is believed to be the first to describe Tom's notorious behaviour: "Peeping Tom, a nick name for a curious prying fellow."

The state playing both Peeping Tom and Moral police is a contradictory and awkward exercise. The official Mr Tom has no accountability on what it sees but expects citizen Toms to show far more restraint in its voyeuristic pleasures. This contradiction was all too evident when the state imposed a ban on hundreds of porn websites. It played moral police and tried to curtail the uninterrupted consumption of free online porn but legions of online Peeping Toms rose in protest and like Speedy Gonzales the state had to revoke the ban.

Armed to the teeth with special devices for ogling, the state is taking to live streaming with a kind of devoted vigilance that is not given even for criminal activities.

This would make taking a bath or sleeping in the buff a national hazard! Yep. It was a bare all moment in Mumbai. The state took its ogling business right into people's bedrooms with the pretext of investigating the nature of their relationship. Did their relationship have official sanction? Nah! So it dragged the couples out of bed to the station to fine them a petty sum of Rs 1200. Then Mr Peeping Tom with certain religious righteousness lectures them on doing it right! With the Peeping Tomism becoming the state's official business we have nothing left to hide!