Is the Pen heavier than the Sword??

First of all, let me explain the long absence from writing. I would blame my job. In this vast canvas of activities, both economic and some uneconomic, the government has the mandate to do the residuary work – anything which the market or the society finds too unrewarding to be bothered with. Within the residuary activities given to the government itself, the Revenue Administration takes care of the residuary tail. Things which no department owns as its own tend to roll up to this door. One of my batchmate in the Police said – everyone’s bastard is the Police’s baby! In this state, we share this responsibility with the Police. Then there are some issues which do not become even the police’s babies – these changelings are always crying for attention, often more than our own legitimate ‘babies’. Needless to say, as long as one’s conscience is awake, one cannot say one has completed one’s work for the day. So these are the moments, when one has smothered the conscience, that one can get some time to write!

The issue that made me smother the conscience this time is this strange belief which our society and State have incorporated in their working. For the want of a better term, I’d call it the Doctrine of offense and reaction. We as a nation labour under the idea that giving offence to a person is a greater wrong than any violent act the person so offended commits. Religionists offended by art, political persons offended by political acts, ‘aam junta’ offended by a ‘non-responsive’ administration – the acts of violent reactions to supposed offences keep on growing, and keep on occupying a major chunk of the working hours of the Administration. If my memory serves me right, this trend has grown exponentially in the past ten years, and seems to be getting stronger every day. How did it start? May be some kind hearted, lazy, or politically dominated police officer or magistrate, on an off day, chose to overlook some act of vandalism sometimes back as an acceptable reaction to the offence given. May be it was just a tactical move by some innovative official – it was easier to silence that one source of offence than to do the right thing and chasten the hooligans. Anyway, that tactical mistake has now grown into strategic proportions – the society now speaks of various laws that curb various non-violent activities that may be deemed offensive by particular sections of the society. It has now seeped into official language of the law and order machinery – how, during ‘this festival’, ‘that section’ of people can be offended, by ‘this thing’, and being a state of ‘religious fervor’, they can be expected to ‘do anything’, hence care should be taken that nobody offends them (this is an English translation of phrases in an official letter in Hindi – I am not kidding!) So, as a State, by our action, as a society, by our inaction, we have created this monster of intolerance and accepted it as fait accompli.

The world might not be inherently just, but it is, most definitely, inherently logical. Illogical constructs cannot be sustained for long – no matter how appealing they may sound or feel. That is why the most well-meaning, ‘let them have cakes instead’ type, judicial pronouncements, enhancing the ‘scope of the right to life’, fail. The doctrine of offense is as unsustainable, as it seeks to curb something which is not a physically manifested phenomenon (offense), instead of the more logical, physically manifest phenomenon (violent reaction). Psychology has had a long debate on whether psychologists should try to understand thoughts or behavior. It has been largely settled that, being manifest, behavior, if monitored and measured, gives the discipline of psychology objectivity and the freedom from personal bias that any discipline wanting to call itself a ‘science’ should possess. Now, law never claimed to be a science. However, even law cannot be just without these two attributes – objectivity and freedom from personal bias. That is why, like the psychology debate, the only logical solution to the question whether the law should proscribe ‘thought crimes’ or ‘action crimes’ should have only one answer. Not only is the idea of criminalizing ‘giving offense’ illogical, it also flies in the face of the most Fundamental Right to Freedom. While the readers of polity might say that this right is subject to ‘reasonable restriction’ by the Constitution itself, only a practitioner, whose responsibility is to enforce that reasonable restriction (yours truly!), knows how difficult it is to define what’s reasonable. When the reasonableness is not defined, the line between the right and wrong, between the victim and the offender gets blurred, and mischief mongers, of all political hues, who gain from general anarchy, start infesting these murky zones. Within these legislative grey areas, the executive erects temporary barriers, as per the personal tastes and the political interests of the incumbent – what may be deemed permissible by one person on that chair, may be deemed proscribed by another person. When someone aggrieved by any such decision moves to the judiciary, the same subjectivity continues, at a larger scale. A single order from the higher Judiciary may draw the lines at location much different from where some Collector or SDO might have drawn them, in their best judgement. As I have described, the dwellers of these murky zones are not your average law abiding citizens, but the persons who generally look for, and revel in, lawlessness. Hence, enforcing these judicial orders becomes another headache for the executive. A single ‘Black Swan’ judgement can rip apart ages of peace cobbled and patched up by the executive. Courts have held that customary religious practices should not be deemed public nuisance. Courts have also deemed noise from religious places as nuisance. This is just an example of legal tightrope walk the State has to do in order to mollycoddle religious (and other, often illogical) sensibilities.  Besides the fact of moral and legal unsustainability of this doctrine, there is the additional fact of fiscal unsustainability. The State does not have just enough force and firepower to prevent all the ‘offence-giving’, especially as the threshold of what is deemed offensive is being continuously and competitively lowered. In 1971, one Company of trained and motivated force could stop two battalions and one mechanized infantry brigade at Longewalla. In this year, I have used one Company of force to keep the peace in a single village during a religious procession. I have also used the same strength of force to allow Food Safety teams to collect two samples of cooking oil from suspected adulterators! If this is not tragicomically unsustainable right now, I’m sure the limit is not too far.

Another idea that goes along with the doctrine of offense is the concept of communal and emotional issues. From my experience of speaking to the most rural of rural populations, I can say with full surety – none of these so called ‘offensive’ issues really comes from an emotional reaction. All this violence is not impulsive, but instrumental. Most of it is well thought and carefully rehearsed political agenda. Judging particular sections of population as ‘religious fanatics’ or ‘emotional idiots’ is insulting their intelligence. In most cases, it is a studied game theory response – the most profitable strategy in the face of the present state policy. People now brandish this threat of taking offence very openly – in order to further illegal acts under the garb of public sentiments. Installing a small religious structure overnight, or putting a small bust or statue of some ‘Mahapurush’ (hero) is the weapon of choice for grabbing choice lands otherwise inaccessible. Even the police and the administration have got well versed in the religious rituals and algorithms – and are now using it to good effect! Recently an illegal religious structure that was being put up thus, solely for the purpose of taking offence and then gaining political mileage, was removed because the administration, with its knowledge of religious rituals could logically argue that since steps A,B, C etc have not been completed yet, your structure is not religious yet, despite it appearing so, and hence, logically, you are not allowed to take offence on its removal! This argument, and some other steps, which shall form the subject of a post retirement book, led to defusing of a situation which could have otherwise easily been this month’s national headline. In many enforcement related cases, where the State might has already been atrophied by the unofficial moratorium on near lethal force, the doctrine of offence is being used as a weapon of last resort against the most restrained use of force, for which even the excuse of being ‘terrorized by the State’ would not hold water. Those being enforced upon would push their ‘leader’ to the front – so that even a push or shove that happens, when the police has abandoned their guns and batons, can be deemed ‘offensive’ to the group as a whole, giving the ‘victims’ an excuse to run riot across the city, giving the administration a new issue to control. One can see the effects – how taking action against godmen has become so difficult. The doctrine of offence has become a threat to the sovereignty of this State itself.

The mandate of the State is to be the monopolist in the exercise of legitimate force. The powers that benefit from anarchy do not hold back their punches, and pursue their agenda with full scale violence. Violence may not be active – it may be passive – as in road or rail blockades, which are incorrectly labelled as ‘peaceful’ protests by our anti-establishment press – incorrectly because although the perpetrators are not indulging in active violence, the effect is the same – someone dying in an ambulance stuck in the blockage, someone losing money in the delays – plus there is the implied threat of real violence if, say, the loco pilot chooses to do the right thing and runs over the ‘protesters’! As the situation stands, the State has already lost a lot of its effectiveness by unilaterally abjuring from real forceful enforcement. If this doctrine of offence is allowed to proceed to its logical conclusion, the society would stagnate – for every step taken in a new direction scorns the status quo, the reverend, the unoffendable. Sigmund Freud has said - “The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.” Every stone hurled in reply to an insult is thus a retrograde step, back to our beastly past, a slow unweaving of the fabric of civilization – and we just do not know what the tipping point might be!