Column

Has not our home minister said that all those who break the law will face Rahul Raj’s fate?

The Bihari boy who was killed had to be killed to keep the city and state safe, the police and the government have said. Most of us want to believe the government because we want to be safe.

What constitutes right action to safeguard the interests of a city-state has been debated from the time Athens began to experiment with democracy. Since then, royal strictures, legislative injunctions, legal precedents, and societal flashpoints have presented some prescriptions for just actions to ensure that our nation, state, and city are safe. As history twitches the moral compass, some of the old prescriptions are overwritten.
One unpleasant example with a redeeming end.

A general assembly of lawmakers of a very rich nation passed a resolution in 2007. A part of the resolution read: “…(government-sanctioned) slavery ranks as the most horrendous of all depredations of human rights and violations of our founding ideals in our nation’s history, and the abolition of slavery was followed by systematic discrimination, enforced segregation, and other insidious institutions and practices toward Americans of African descent that were rooted in racism, racial bias, and racial misunderstanding.”

The assembly was that of the southern American state of Virginia, in which, as the resolution makes clear, slavery was an accepted practice. More important, the document, which was meant to be an apology, noted sadly that a fiat of law had not ended ‘depredations of human rights’. So it is with India, so it is with Mumbai.
Law, it seems obvious to me, will not eradicate anti-migrant sentiment, nor will it quell illegal reactions to it.

It has always been the case that the law made it its chief purpose to offer security to a society. That aim militates against nuanced, humanist interpretations. Cicero, one of Rome’s finest orators (he lived between 106 BC and 43 BC) observed that “Our ancestors wrote laws whose sole aim was the stability and interests of the state.

The state is best off when governed according to laws, but all laws should be interpreted in the light of that goal.” Cicero then went on to praise Epaminondas of Thebes, who illegally prolonged his command over the military, for “[rightly passing] over the letter of the law, thinking it sheer madness not to interpret in terms of the stability of the state.”

This is a precedent that RR Patil and the police force unwittingly invoked when Patil said that those who take the law into their hands would be swiftly and decisively dealt with. Now as a statesman who has shown respect to the classical canon of jurisprudence, we can expect Patil to take swift and decisive action against ALL those who took law into their hands over the past few weeks in Mumbai. This is good news for our metro.
raghu@dnaindia.net