Several disparate events over the past couple of weeks must cause disquiet over what appears to be a gravely disturbing trend. The nation needs to get its priorities right.

The Supreme Court was scathing in condemning the DMK’s Tamil Nadu bundh in support of speedy implementation of the Sethusamudram project in defiance of its order banning any such action. (Bundhs were banned by the Kerala High Court in 1997, a judgement endorsed a year later by the Supreme Court.) Bundhs had become endemic as a result of political rather than industrial action, with governments virtually ordering public transport off the road and closing schools and offices, thereby setting off a chain reaction resulting in total work stoppages.

These events were seldom spontaneous, but invariably coercive, violent and destructive if anyone dared disobey the call. The distinction judicially drawn between a hartal (allegedly a general strike) and a bundh was and essentially remains a distinction without a difference. General strikes are called by unions and may include peaceful picketing; but in the Indian context these niceties have been all too often ignored in favour of confrontation.

The democratic right to strike is conceded and must be upheld; but so too must be the right to work, life and livelihood. For thousands of poor daily labourers, deprivation of the right to work during the day means that their families go to bed hungry at night. The economic and social cost of forced closures is enormous and hurts the poor most. So rights and freedoms have to be balanced and matters cannot be settled by muscle power or false ideology.

If the TN bandh was uncalled for, the Supreme Court’s obiter dictum that it might direct the Centre to place the State under President’s rule was equally misplaced. Mr Karunanidhi’s claim that he was personally on a Gandhian fast but back at work as Chief Minister as the bundh faded with the passage of the sun, was a charade.

The Court rightly ruled that everybody is accountable. So too are judges and so it is therefore sad that just a few days earlier the Delhi High Court sentenced four journalists from the Mid-day for contempt for scandalising the former chief justice in a matter in which the accused were willing to argue truth as a defence.

The much delayed but deserved sentences by a Patna trial court against Anand Mohan, a Bihar MP and mafia don, his  wife and two MLAs for direct complicity in the foul murder of the then Gopalganj district magistrate in 1994 is yet another case of people misusing influence, power and wealth to defy and even derail the law. Though justice has been done, delayed process has often become the rule, inviting public anger and “direct action”.

Addressing DGs of Police last week, the Prime Minister warned against “vigilante justice”, referring to recent lynchings in Vaishali and Bhagalpur. The Courts too have warned of untoward consequences flowing from judicial delays and long pending case files. Yet months after the Supreme Court's “deadline” for governments to act on the inordinately delayed but now updated police reform package, most states and the Union Territories are yet to act.

If the Centre had given a bold lead in Delhi, Chandigarh and Pondicherry, the example may spur action elsewhere. But here again there has been foot-dragging all round on wholly unconvincing grounds as the political class simply does not wish to give up control over the law enforcement machinery including the intelligence and investigatory services, failing back on archaic official secrecy laws which should have been repealed with the enactment of the RTI Act.

The latest victim of this mischief is Maj Gen (Retd) V K Singh who has been charged with violating official secrecy in a book published earlier this year. This case undermines whistleblower protection and tends to extend immunity to wrongdoers and corrupt persons on exaggerated  grounds of national security, a catch all mantra that precludes transparency, accountability and public learning.

The failure to legislate parliamentary or other oversight (as advocated by the L P Singh Committee decades ago) has created a state within a state that has been misused by the powers that be or could run amuck. The stubborn unwillingness to give up the repeatedly abused requirement of official or ministerial sanction to prosecute officials and ministers charged with corruption has given open license to corruption with impunity. Politics has triumphed over national interest.

Finally, the latest case of political chicanery witnessed in the unholy divorce between the two erstwhile coalition partners in Karnataka, the JD(S) and BJP shows how low values have fallen, despite the high sounding reasons advanced so eloquently by both sides. This, amidst the mounting allegations of amassing disproportionate assets against the erstwhile reigning Deve Gowda family, a tale no different from similar rags to riches stories from other capitals.