Anarchy: A Collective Responsibility

India is a functional anarchy. The truth: It is no longer functional. Diagnosis: The system is suffering a multiple organ failure. The symptoms: Everywhere from the street center, the unlit narrow streets to the Assembly or Parliament we are reveling in utter disregard to law. As a polity we create by default or design a huge chaotic, system defying field by our natural and instinctive disrespect for law.
Candle-light protest against rape and roses for traffic violators, is too symbolic and too little. Let’s examine the tragedy that India Circa 2013: Rape – Most foul – it is now just not rape. It is gang rape, rape of minor, rape followed by unimaginable and indescribable acts; an insensitive police system that is willing to bribe the complainant than prosecute the accused. Even the thought is nauseating. Protestors against gory crimes carrying placards demanding the ‘Rule of Law’ are seen as a nuisance. The streets of our democracy are quarantined from protestors. Our judicial administrators have long ago declared that when a choice is to be made between “public inconvenience” (read smooth flow of traffic) and a liberal interpretation of “protest by the collective as part of social bargaining”, the former is to be preferred!!
The investigating agencies of crime are lethargic, politicalised, corrupt, insensitive and thus the fence that is dining on the crop it is designed to protect. The premier agency is politicalised at its bone marrow, while the judiciary looks at is product with unpredictable moods: Sometimes with the microscope and sometimes through its blindfold eyes. Take the instance of how the CBI was at the door step of a political ally who after periodic threats of Talaq uttered the word thrice to the central coalition. Take the case of another son in jail after being branded persona non grata.
At the threshold of a fresh quinquennial outing at the hustings look at the choices we have : the Ms ( Maya, Mamta, Modi or Manmohan!!) The nation is now called upon to choose between a party rejected a decade ago and with nothing to suggest any change or progress on its come-back assay on the one hand and on the other the blundering, plundering ruling party whose repute is in shatters. In the derailment of the system, the Rule of Law has been a major casualty .
The citizen is the primordial contributor. He looks for a hidden price tag everywhere and anywhere. From using the prohibited cancer stick on the main road to not using the mandatory helmet, he enjoys, enjoys breaking every law/regulation. He defies a one-way traffic signal for convenience, the traffic signal for urgency and at every testing doorstep willing to wink at legal requirements. The lack of order is a corollary to our collective disrespect to law. We break the law and defend ourselves that the law is unjust. We bribe and blame the man who takes the amount!! We give ‘dowry’ and fault the ‘groom’ who takes it. The resultant ‘Double-Speak’ could only lead us to the ‘Animal Farm’ we find ourselves in.
Look at the Legislature: can one recall a single value based debate over the last one and half decades (including the Nirbhaya Bill)? Conjure up a picture of an Assembly in session and you have memories of legislators rushing to the well, staging walk outs threatening one another, pulling mikes, scant respect for a watching citizenry and total disregard to people needs. They, they are our law makers. Yatha Raaja Thata Praja.
The Executive: We have Ministers who face serious charges continuing in the cabinet. Files praying for attention and sanction for prosecuting high level officers from the bureaucracy. A Union Minister is forced to resign for his alleged involvement in the 2G scam. Come down a minor scale of latitude and see the latitude the local Home Minister enjoys!! What is sauce for the goose is cyanide for the gander!! The common man thus knows that he lives in an extremely maneuverable system. Some people are above the law and it takes a few factors to be propelled into that layer. Criminal Creamy layer!!
The Judiciary is crumbling under the burden of self importance. In an increasingly unpredictable interpretative and discretionary mode, it often suffers credibility in whispered voices. When justice differs with the foot of the Chancellor, the common man is more than just bewildered by the semantics. Take the two major CBI cases in the state: one where the fulcrum is a dead person and another on a come-back trail. Two conflicting judicial verdicts. You can indulge in legalistic hair splitting till the cows come home only at the cost of serious dents to the veracity of the system.
In the midst of such lawlessness and defiance to law the hapless, helpless citizen who once sang, now echoes in parody: jana gana mangla dayaka jaya he; bharata bhagya vidhata ; jaya he jaya he jaya he……..

L. Ravichander.