A situation has come about where breaking of laws and rules has become the social norm
About 20 years ago, as Internal Security Minister, P Chidambaram described an incident he had witnessed at a conference of India’s top police officials to underscore the point that the people had lost trust in the police and the time had come to regain it. This was the incident: “My car, escorted by policemen, was making its way through a crowd. A young man accidentally fell down before my car. When a policeman tried to pick him up, he started wailing, ‘I beg your forgiveness and mercy. Spare me, don’t beat me, I have not done anything wrong.’ This clearly shows that the very sight of policemen is associated with fear and harassment and people want to stay clear of them.”
As an instrument of colonial power, this was the image of India’s police before Independence. Not only has it not changed since, it has actually become worse. Generations of ordinary policemen enter the force after paying a huge amount to some political fixers and then get into the habit of making some money by misusing their uniform to recoup the amount paid for entry and for getting choice postings. A Transparency International-CMS survey of corruption in 11 basic services availed of by Below the Poverty Line (BPL) families ranked the police service at the top.
Here is an incident I witnessed in power-drunk Delhi that illustrates another facet of India. A policeman was attempting to stop unruly drivers from entering a busy road from the wrong end. A well-dressed young man driving an imported SUV ignored the policeman’s protest, entered the road from the wrong end and then threw a couple of hundred-rupee notes at the policeman before driving away. Cursing him, the policeman noted down the vehicle details, picked up the money and left the place.
This scenario is of the new citizenry that is getting used to a way of life in which laws and rules and their enforcement have no place. The most frightening aspect is the blatant use of one’s might, money and influence to get whatever one wants. If one does not personally have money and influence, the next best thing is to stay close to those who do.
Today no law or rule is sacred. Anything that prescribes order in society is subject to manipulation and disregard. No one in the political system is concerned about this. On the contrary, they encourage it as part of competitive electoral politics. In Bangalore, a government set to go out of office passed a law to regularize all illegal constructions and land encroachments, since its constituents were the biggest gainers. There were no protests from any quarters, although such regularization of unauthorized constructions would have serious implications for the future of India’s Silicon Valley. The national capital had set the example by overturning a court decision that declared illegal furious construction activity in many of its congested parts.
The issue of moral hazard, that is, governmental action that benefits law-breakers over the law-abiding, and encourages people to think that governments can be bent with minimal street action to regularize any illegal act does not figure highly in India’s political discourse. At one time in our short history as an independent nation, the Union government and its leadership, unlike the states, was known to uphold some basic laws and principles in the interest of orderly nation-building. The arrival of coalitions in Delhi compromised this. The high economic costs of non-rule based and ever-compromising governance are visible whenever we try to move from Third to First World status our highways, power sector, urban planning, environment protection, health, law and order or any other aspect of development. Yet this economic cost has not been estimated.
The hallmark of a healthy democracy is its people’s respect for the rule of law that is born of its impartial and uniform enforcement. How can generations of young people imbibe this respect when they grow up in a political and social environment where law violators go unscathed? The breakdown of enforcement of any law or rule for managing civilized life around us is creating a citizenry that considers violation of laws and rules the social norm. That poses a long-term danger to our political system.
There is a glib view that this is a passing phase of a society in transition. As the saying goes, “what is bred in the bones, will never be out of the flesh”. Law-abiding behaviour is not induced by economic prosperity. The more money one has, the greater perhaps the tendency to buy immunity from the law. The customary calls to uphold democratic values or the rule of law made every Independence Day and educational programmes to promote them will surely fail, if the citizenry is not made to experience in everyday life the presence of a fairly enforced rule of law that defines the boundaries of each person’s individual freedom.
The genie of lawlessness, reflected not just in the crime graph but in personal behaviour and action around us needs to be put back into the bottle, if India is to be a part of the First World.
The hallmark of a healthy democracy is its people’s respect for the rule of law that is born of its impartial and uniform enforcement. How can young people imbibe this respect when they grow up in a political and social environment where law violators go unscathed?
