A battle lost?

The task of preserving law and order can be accomplished only when ordinary citizens and those who wield constitutionally sanctioned authority respect law.

STOCKTAKING is a customary way of beginning each year. It usually generates some introspection over gains and losses in the year gone by. Appropriately, my first column for 2003 undertakes this useful but difficult exercise.

I have to begin necessarily with two questions that may sound rather rhetorical in the Indian context. Is there respect for law from all those who wield authority derived from the Constitution? Do all of them employ such authority to curb law breaking so that the average law-abiding citizen is allowed peace in the pursuit of happiness? I wish I could respond to these crucial questions in the affirmative. Gujarat is not only too recent to be forgotten. Its dimensions were also too horrendous to ignore and put aside the monstrous tales that are still circulating.

The year began with the Godhra incident in which nearly 60 lives were lost. All because some miscreant passengers on the Sabarmati Express did not pay for the food they had consumed at a stall in the railway station, and a few of them had allegedly misbehaved with a girl whom they had forcibly confined to a railway carriage. Tribal responses do not build a nation. They actually destroy one. What followed Godhra was one of the saddest chapters in India's history. Rough estimates put the toll of riots, directed purely against the minority community, at more than 700.

During the year we also had two major railway accidents, one in Uttar Pradesh and the other in Andhra Pradesh. Sabotage is suspected in both cases. If this is true, how can we be smug that we have maintained law and order in our country? Attacks on two famous temples, in Jammu and in Gujarat, targeted innocent Hindu devotees. Several assassinations of prominent politicians and the killing of civilians in Jammu and Kashmir did no credit to the State administration. As I write this comes news of the fourth in a series of mass murders in Kashmir, all happening within a week. To cap all these, we had a former Minister kidnapped and murdered in cold blood by a brigand who still eludes the police net. Built around all these unforgivable heinous crimes, there is an attitude of resignation that I perceive all around me.

ON the positive side, we did have some stern judicial pronouncements in the cases relating to the attack on Parliament and the murder of a police constable in Coimbatore which portrayed resoluteness in responding to terrorism. The capital sentences passed in the two cases should send the right signal to those who want to intimidate constitutional government and law-abiding citizens. The Madras High Court's recent confirmation of a sentence passed by the Sessions Court against a godman in Tamil Nadu for heinous offences of murder and rape also reaffirms our faith in the judicial process.

At the same time, we have had some shockers of judgments, which are nothing but an unintended and unwitting invitation to licence and crime. We must remember that the judiciary has a definite role in disseminating the message that anyone playing with law and order, however highly placed in government or society, will meet with severe punishment, and any defence quibbling of technicalities in a criminal trial would not pass muster with courts. Unfortunately, some courts have not been fully sensitive to this role. This is sad given the excellent track record of the judiciary in the not very distant past.

Against this backdrop, the widespread belief is that the battle against disorder has been lost, that things can only get worse in our country. This gloom may well be justified on the basis of the chronicle of events during the past year attempted above. An inveterate optimist like me would not, however, in a huff, like to write off a country that has repeatedly shown incredible resilience. I still feel the situation can be stabilised, if not totally retrieved, provided we can restore governance and are not carried away by discordant euphoria so assiduously circulated by small-time politicians who rejoice over the inauguration or demise of governments.

GUJARAT is an example that can warm many of us who are despondent. Elections in that State were remarkable for the near order that was seen during polling. There were very few incidents of violence, and this was a pleasant surprise, given Godhra and its aftermath. The post-election scene did give some anxious moments. But the situation was swiftly contained. This showed the presence of governance as against a mere government. Modi's past rhetoric may not exactly have won admirers among those who stand for secularism in its strict construction. The fact that he now chooses to be sedate and wants to carry all sections with him in the task of reconstructing a battered State is a happy augury for the future.

Let us hope this maturity is not contrived. Even if it were so, such display of balance sends out a healthy message and helps to put out of action albeit temporarily those who are itching for mischief.

It is Gujarat that engenders in me the feeling that we have not yet lost sanity and, given some will and sagacity, we can project ourselves as a nation that firmly believes in maintaining law and order. This is an image that we need to circulate among the comity of nations. We have to establish a reputation something different from what the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has managed, after deporting Anees Ibrahim to Pakistan, totally oblivious to the fact that the world's largest democracy needs to try him for a crime in which hundreds of lives were lost. We need to show we are different from Indonesia where a chief executive officer of an international corporation gets locked up over what is out-and-out a civil dispute. We need to highlight that we are no Pakistan, and that international sportsmen can come and display their skills before us without the fear of grenade attacks. We need Bill Gates and his ilk to travel freely into our country at will to share their innovation, and also savour our hospitality and culture that are proverbial.

My extensive travel during the past two years has more than convinced me that we cannot attract foreign investment unless we prove to the satisfaction of the West that there is governance in our country. The shrewd Western observer is not impressed with mere trappings of democracy. He wants to be convinced that he can do business in India without fear of intimidation or personal physical danger. I can speak with some authority that no foreign corporation would like to share its intellectual assets with or assign work to any Indian company, especially information technology companies, unless it is assured of a hundred per cent secure environment. The expectation is not confined to cyber security. It is also physical security for those foreign executives and entrepreneurs who would like to come and satisfy themselves personally as to how their investments and other assets were being protected. Our most fearsome competitor is China, and as a totalitarian country it provides a level of security that should be our model while trying to attract foreign capital. The alibi of constitutional limitations in a democracy that comes in the way of stricter enforcement of the law does not impress anybody outside India. The Singapore model is often cited, possibly inappropriately. We cannot, however, give the feeling that we are a soft nation that is indifferent to those who are bent upon creating disorder.

September 11 showed that evil forces reign supreme in the world. With a religious cloak and licence around them, they have the capacity to strike repeatedly to demoralise all of us. Indians are extremely vulnerable, with a hostile neighbour whose sustenance depends on spitting venom against us so as to misinform the international community and whose only preoccupation is to promote disharmony between the majority and minority communities. We have done well to give an effective military response. We have done equally well to impress international opinion on how hollow our neighbour is. But then, what have we done to cut down recruitment from the Muslim segment of our population to Pakistan's standpoint? It is easy to say that we need not make any special effort, and that every citizen will have to be necessarily patriotic, irrespective of his or her religious allegiance. Such a mindless stand is valid only in the ideal world. We are not living in one. It is time that we moved away from daily fulminations against cross-border terrorism, a phenomenon that will continue and about which the rest of the world has already been fairly convinced by India through some refreshing diplomacy. I feel we have reached a point of no return, and that any more propaganda against Pakistan's machinations will only be counter-productive. We now need to concentrate on the task of how to win over the Muslim youth in the country so that they do not get drawn towards Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism.

The canker is too deep and widespread, and we can ignore it only at our peril. Remember that as placid a territory as Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu, a State that had prided itself for communal harmony in the past, has been converted to a hotbed of mischief for promoting dubious religious causes. I cannot see any improvement of the domestic law and order situation without cutting off supplies to clerics and Inter-Services Intelligence agents. This does not for a moment suggest brutal measures to penalise conversion to militancy. It rather commends throwing up enough incentives to the youth to stay away from them.

THE objective should be to create a stake in pursuing lawful activity. Such a stake will be established only through easy access to education and availability of job opportunities, both in the organised and unorganised sectors. Governments can at best guide the process, but it is the private industry that will have to invest massively to offer meaningful vocations. Literacy levels among Muslims are painfully low and we need to act quickly to raise them. I am also surprised that very few Muslim youth are either in IT or hospitality industry, two sectors which are booming and where private initiatives have paid rich dividends. I am aware of such a strategy paying rich dividends more than two decades ago. This was in Srikakulam district in Andhra Pradesh that was infested with extremist activities. Special schemes devised by the civil administration, including the police, aimed at creating job opportunities brought about a change of heart among the hardboiled terrorists and helped to restore normalcy.

Not all that remote from the above problem is how to create respect for law among ordinary citizens. At present I see no such respect that is spontaneous, one that springs from a conviction that a strong nation is the outcome of such positive perception of law. I do not believe that opinion leaders in this area can come solely from the political class. On the contrary, they may not at all be practising politicians who have their own compulsions to break the law or abet wanton disregard of law to perpetuate themselves. Those who preach respect for law and order may come only from among distinguished personalities with a track record of community service, some of whom are in positions only because they are too good to be kept out of reckoning.

President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam is one such person who is capable of transforming a whole generation. While many of us may not measure up to his standards of patriotism and probity, there is a lot we can do to sow seeds of discipline among the youth. The way he seizes opportunities and connects readily with the younger generation is something that we need to absorb and emulate. Direct interaction with future citizens on aspects of citizenship will alone bring about the much-needed positive view of law.

What is the role of the police in this formidable task of promoting respect for law? The minimum that we can ask for is that policemen should themselves not break the law or even remotely abet such activity.

This could seem asking for the moon. But then, are we not all aiming at the ideal in our day-to-day activity? Why do a majority of us spend a moment or two each day praying to the Almighty? Senior officers in the police hierarchy have the sacred duty of themselves adhering to law and ensuring that they indoctrinate those whom they supervise in the basics of the ethics that governs policing. There will always be ethical dilemmas in enforcing law. But these are not beyond being resolved, provided both the police and the community are vigilant.

I cannot end better than by quoting Joycelyn M. Pollock writing on `Ethics and Law Enforcement' for Critical Issues in Policing (2001) (Waveland Press, Prospect Heights, Illinois):

"Some may complain that no other profession's members are as heavily scrutinised as police or held to such a high standard, but when one understands the nature of public service, it is clear that the nature of the profession creates greater expectations. Law enforcement is not just a `job'; it is an acceptance of the responsibility of `protecting' and `serving'... it is accepting the responsibility to uphold and protect the law."