The rule of law not numbers: Meghnad Desai
October 26, 2008: The Indian Express
Raj Thackeray has at last been arrested. Supine governments in Maharashtra and Delhi have after many months decided to show a bit of force to assert the Rule of Law. After dithering in Jammu and Kashmir, Kandhamal and Karnataka, at least there has been some resolution in Mumbai.
The spectre that haunts Congress and indeed the secular establishment is the fear of insulting any sect, any movement, any gang that can raise the banner of religious or regional identity: This is why the movement in Jammu was treated as anything but law-breaking. Similarly for Orissa and Karnataka. The issue is not whether the conversions are genuine or obtained by bribes, but that the Bajrang Dal has broken the law. The same applies to Raj Thackeray. He may or may not reflect the legitimate grievances of the Marathi-speaking people of Mumbai, but he is doing so in an illegal manner. Any political vote bank calculus should be subordinate to the affirmation of the Rule of Law.
Indeed I would strongly argue that secularism is no longer the sound doctrine it used to be to settle these matters. Years of shoddy compromise by Indira and Rajiv Gandhi and Narasimha Rao et al have left the doctrine in a sad state. It has allowed the BJP to mount a spurious attack on it as pseudo secularism. The issue then is not that we need to treat all religions alike. In a democracy, the majority religion will take the largest slice of the goodies. Its practices will be called normal and all minority religions will or can be made to look like deviants. Protection to communities gets compromised by their numbers being large or small. Suddenly they become vote banks rather than citizen communities to be wooed if their numbers justify and not if they don’t count.
What matters instead is that all Indian citizens regardless of religion, region, age or gender need the same protection under law that the Constitution affords them. It is the duty of the State to use its legal powers and its monopoly of force to ensure that right. It is this universality which allows the State to treat a terrorist as a criminal regardless of his religion and also regardless of whatever injustices he may think his community has suffered. The Gujarat riots do not allow Muslims to take the law in their hands any more than a suspicion of forced conversion allows a Hindu mob to attack Christians. The fact that a crime can be rationalised is no defence in law.
I was reminded of this strongly when watching Nandita Das’ new film Firaaq, which was shown at the London Film Festival. She has managed to capture the fear and the intimidation that were in the air in the interlude between days of rioting. There is no actual violence shown. There are no black and white characters. There are bad Muslims and good Hindus and vice versa. But the aggressive behaviour of some Gujarati Hindus and the police shows that they think of themselves as normal and in the right as they break the law. The Muslim characters in the film, who conspire in an almost tragicomic fashion to get a revolver, are also fuelled by righteous feeling, which should not justify what they are up to. The normality of violent illegal behaviour portrayed is chilling and only a handful of characters, especially that of Arti played by Dipti Naval, show any moral fibre.
Firaaq shows a State which is absent or on the side of the majority, which is acting illegally. That is an indictment against the Gujarat state and its Chief Minister Narendra Modi, and not the inflated charges of genocide or pogrom. It is his failure to uphold the Rule of Law-his rajadharma, as Atalji feebly tried to remind him, which is serious. This failure is absolute whether one person is injured or many, whether a hundred Hindus are killed relative to one Muslim or vice versa. It is not a calculus of numbers; it is a matter of Law.
It is this sense of Law that is lacking, despite much flurry of litigation and PIL. Legality and litigation mongering are no substitute for the simple doctrine of equality before the Law. Here another injustice deserves a mention. Maqbool Fida Hussain is 93 this month and he has been driven in exile by irresponsible litigation. Not only does such vexatious litigation clog up the courts, but it is a way of denying justice and harassing the person being sued. Again no one in a position of authority in this secular socialist democratic republic has stood up for Hussain. The issue is neither the quality and the content of his art nor his talent. It is that as a citizen of India he has rights, which have to be guaranteed as much as if he was a Christian, a Buddhist, a Hindu or a Muslim.
The contrast between an India that can go to the moon using the best of science and technology and an India where some petty political gangster can deny the rights of Biharis to live in Mumbai is palpable. There is a disconnect here, just as there is in our desire to have a seat at the UN Security Council and not in the top tier of Human Development ranking. We tolerate 50 per cent malnourished children as long as we can explode a nuclear device. No one can challenge our sovereign right to explode a useless and expensive device, but then no one can either ask us to feed our children properly or protect our citizens from the murderous intent of their political leaders. But that is alright. India is still the largest free market liberal democracy and also a socialist country. The poor should be grateful they are part of the rich diversity of India, that is Bharat
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