The Hindu Business Line : The reach of justice

This writer stays in South Kolkata, a few hundred feet away from what is claimed to be the biggest shopping mall in the country. Right in front of his house, which is situated at an important, perennially clogged, road-crossing, is a large vacant, leafy plot where, to cut a long story short, unauthorised motorcar garages have sprung up once again.

Beside these illegal outfits, contributing diligently to noise pollution, choking traffic and adding materially to the potential fire hazards that abound in the metropolis, is a hooch outlet where, every night, there is a brawl — almost by regulation, so to speak — making life for peace-loving and law-abiding citizens in the neighbourhood even more “comfortable” than it already is, in a manner of speaking.

Cops in the know

There is, of course, no reason for the latter group (who, incidentally, form the vast majority of Kolkata’s citizenry, as is always the case everywhere) to feel insecure for, just three minutes away by car, there is located a police station which, in saner times, has been considered to be the nerve-centre of the “limb of the law” operating in that particular area of the city.

Disparaging rumours suggest that the policemen know all about the illegal workshops and the hooch-den, but this is an entirely different issue and ought not to concern us here, and is better left to those whose job is to police the police.

The specific point here is that the rights of average, law-abiding citizens are being violated in the heart of a major Indian city, a phenomenon that is almost certainly being replicated in most other metropolises, not to speak of other, less-exalted, regions.

If this is what is happening in the cities and towns, imagine the state of “justice” in the rural areas, where feudal notions of fairness still prevail which would fail to stand the scrutiny of modern society. The problem facing “emergent India” is that, as the gap between what is old and traditional and what is new and emerging is growing — sometimes exponentially — there are ideological interests (themselves fossilised over time) which have not hesitated once again to enter the social scene and apply their “instruments” of persuasion and conversion in a brutal fashion, leading to death and mayhem in the interior regions.

Plight of rural folk

So what happens to the “face of justice” which the rural folk have usually heard about but not really seen with their own eyes? “Revenge killings” are what these poor, but not unhappy, people — comprising the backbone of the Indian Republic — are often used to as “fair retribution”, more often than not organised by “outsiders”.

They have no choice because they wield no real power, about which they are reminded periodically at election-time. So when the police go to a village to get details about outsiders who have indulged in “political” killings, they are met by a sullen silence, the eyes saying everything without a word being uttered. Only the bravest of the brave open their mouths, but they do not tell the State what it wants to know.

At Sirsi village in West Midnapore district of West Bengal, very near Lalgarh, where the security forces are said to have more or less sanitised the area vis-À-vis the Maoists, when a woman was asked to sign a piece of paper that would have allowed a post-mortem to be done on the body of her husband, who was gunned down by the extremists for siding with the opposition, she is quoted as having said: “Why do this? I am not going to get him back. They will come to our place on Sunday. We have been told to leave this place. I don’t want to lose my sons”.

Can there be even a semblance of “justice” in an environment where there is little, or no, economic development? Is India too big for development to reach out to every nook and corner of rural society that really matters? What is an Asian Tiger worth if it cannot growl in its own den?

RANABIR RAY CHOUDHURY

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