Harsh laws are effective deterrents

Hope you had a good Diwali this year. What’s for sure is you’ve had a quieter one. Which tells you something, doesn’t it?

What it tells you is clear from yet another observation. At the fag end of any recent Mumbai party, when guests are getting ready to say their thank yous and their goodbyes, have you heard the host say, “Hey, have one for the road?”

It was a sentence that was repeated with metronomic regularity every evening. Now
what you hear, instead, is this: “Only one drink for me tonight. I am driving.”

In a city which prided itself on its sybaritic ways, this is quite a change. Even a month ago, most people would have considered it impossible for such a transformation to have taken place so quickly and so dramatically.

“In Mumbai?” they would have said, and laughed. 

How did this happen? In plain and simple terms, it’s because suddenly there is a fear of the law.

This marks a profound change in our society: fear of the law has always been an alien concept for Indian upper classes.

We knew, with some justification, that to bend the law, we could use ‘influence’ or the power of our wallets.

Armed with these ‘superior’ weapons, we happily broke rules and regulations with impunity.

It’s different now. Fines for breaking traffic rules were so ridiculously low that no one owning a car had problems paying them.

Now you spend the night in jail, an idea too horrible to even contemplate.  So now you drink less, or pay your driver overtime, or encourage your non-drinking spouse to take the wheel.

Similarly, what has brought compliance on the ban on noisy firecrackers, is the high visibility of the police, coupled with the announcement that there would be a fine of one lakh rupees for late night explosions.

People didn’t mind taking a risk with a few hundred. But with a lakh?

I hope the senior police hierarchy everywhere in the country is taking all this in and has drawn the right conclusions: you need tough laws, and you need tough enforcement.

Once that’s done you need to tom tom your achievements so that news gets around. The police in Mumbai have done this, and the results are there for all to see.

Should I now spoil the party by saying how bad things must be that we are so very happy with what are really minor policing achievements?

I am cheering loudly nevertheless, because the time has come for us to take a pragmatic view of the role of the police. In an ideal world, there would be no police corruption, no antiquated laws to enforce, no interference from a venal political leadership. 

But it’s far from an ideal world as we can see.  The Rizuwan case in Kolkata seems to show that the very rich can persuade the police to overlook even a murder.

Or as the Singur and Nandigram happenings show, a state government can even unleash violence deliberately and allow it to take its own dangerous course.

Then there is the case — unfortunately not uncommon — of  the Bihar politician and history sheeter who being  a legislator is a  law-maker!

We may want to wish this reality away but unless you are the type who wears his rose tinted glasses even to bed, you know it’s a reality which won’t change too much in the near future.

Which is why it would be pragmatic to accept a severely limited role for the police, where even good officers have to work within extremely restricted boundaries.

But won’t a pragmatic acceptance of these boundaries enable the police to work efficiently within them at least?

Don’t underestimate the power of what this will do. All over the world, even in developed societies, there are police irregularities.

Even a generally respected force like the British police has shown that its hands are not lily white. Yet, overall, there is respect for the force, and a general fear of breaking the law.

The Mumbai police have achieved that with its recent anti-noise, anti-drink drives. If they find more areas to work in, within those pragmatic boundaries, our fear of the law will only increase.

Which is how it should be.