JOIN USDelhi violence: Missing the wood for the trees
India’s National Security Adviser, no less, did night rounds to quell the unprecedented violence in Delhi last week, to restore a semblance of law and order and to reassure the terrified citizens, who were victims of mindless mob violence, of their safety and security. Where was Delhi Police, you might ask. What does this tell you of the state of safety, security and public order in the national capital or, indeed, in these contentious times, in other parts of the country? Lest we miss the wood for the trees, let us be clear, this is more than about protests for or against the CAA, even if the adversarial engagement between the two sides appears to be the proximate cause. What we are witnessing is Machiavellian evil.
The violence in Delhi is a metaphor for how lawlessness works in the real world. It is also an allegorical tale of our times that must give us pause and compel us to reflect on what we are making of ourselves, our communities, and our country. The rough beast in our society slouches in steady, unfettered, progress towards a dystopian goal; and the social haemorrhaging is beginning to overtake us.
In this surreal theatre of the absurd, by refusing to establish and enforce the ‘rule of law’, the so-called guardians of the law -- the police -- in state after state, are letting the mighty off the hook. This is proof, if the ordinary citizen needed it at all, of the unholy nexus between the politician and the police; of the precipitous decline in our public institutions; and, in consequence, of the demise of liberty, equality and justice, certainly for the poor, the disadvantaged and the vulnerable.
What is the ‘rule of law’ anyway? In India, time after time, it has meant that some are above the law while most citizens are below the law. But we are not unique in this. There are several other societies and communities where this is so. What should concern us in deep and troubling ways is the anatomy of violence and lawlessness.
Consider the following: the Nelli massacre of 1983, the anti-Sikh riots in 1984, what happened at Godhra and what followed in Gujarat in 2002; and now Delhi in 2020. There is a common pattern in the anatomy of the violence in all these terrible episodes in our history. They are characterised by three features: First, an agency of rioters gets to work and responds to a drumbeat, as it were. The drummer decides when the violence must stop. Put simply, it is almost always orchestrated.
Second, without exception, all of them were preceded by incendiary speeches by politicians of all hues, urging the supporters to proceed to set right a wrong or, worse still, to uphold the right. There is a frightening loss of responsibility as the size of the crowd grows and a point is reached when the demagogue loses control over the crowd.
Third, the police whose constitutional duty it was to act with full force, failed to act. They either looked the other way or waited for orders from their political masters, with unconscionable consequences.
The frightening part is best described in the prophetic words of WB Yeats: “The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
There is a serious rule of law problem in how the law is enforced and public order is maintained. Fundamental to the rule of law is that like cases will be treated alike. This is why, respect for precedent is so important to our legal system -- it goes to the core of fairness and justice. In the absence of strong enforcement, it is precisely the elected representatives and local political leaders who, literally, get away with murder.
The problem is the gradual but inexorable breakdown of the rule of law, preceded by the erosion of equality before the law, in our country. There are several reasons, including a dysfunctional electoral system based on the first past the post system; an increasingly ungovernable society; an overloaded, besieged and slow-moving judicial system; strong ideological interests without any real concern for national needs; concentration of wealth and influence in fewer and fewer hands; and the pathological evolution of powerful groups prepared to defy the law and use violence in pursuit of their goals.
For the rule of law to be well established and enforced, we need to start at the very beginning -- mobilising our local communities. A strong, mobilized, civil society is a necessary condition to hold the State to account. It is not about one seemingly revolutionary protest, even if the well-meaning antagonists of the CAA genuinely believe so. When violence and lawlessness spill over into the streets and begin to constrain our work-a-day lives, as it has across India; when the police are routinely challenged by those on the wrong side of the law; when the police force is overworked and overwhelmed by political subterfuge, our society will be on the brink. As a society, we are currently engaged in a negative-sum game. The rule of law cannot, unlike riots, be engineered. It can only be practiced if we understand that liberty has to be balanced with equality; and pluralism entails a measure of negative liberty.
Before we reach that point of no return, we must recognise that the rule of law is about day-to-day struggles, in which each of us has to commit to be subject to and uphold. It is a process of building voice and accountability, and we have a long way to travel. It is a process because the State and its power elite must learn to be more accountable; and we, as citizens, must learn to work together despite our differences. It is time both learn.
(The writer is Director, Public Affairs Centre, Bengaluru)