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!
