Last week it was reported in the media that the Law Commission had recommended that gambling and betting in sports may be legalised in India. This was widely reported in the media and several discussions were held on the electronic media regarding this issue, however, just a day after, the Law Commission denied making any such recommendation.

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Now, this is strange and it creates a problem. A problem not only for the people who have access to the report and are able to conclude whether the Law Commission has recommended legalising sports betting or not, but also for the layman who relies on the media to know what is going on in the world. I will come to the question of discussion on merits of the subject matter a little later in the article, however, it is important to ponder over the issue of communication and how such reports can create a lot of avoidable confusion in the readers’ mind.

There can be only two possibilities which I am able to think of — first, either the report was so badly drafted that it did not speak out clearly what was being recommended and different readers could possibly interpret and understand it in a different manner; second, there could be the possibility that the report was fairly unequivocal and unambiguous, however, the media persons were not able to understand it because of their lack of understanding of the language and absolutely abysmal legal literacy.

If we analyse these two possibilities, we can obviously draw the conclusion that the meaning was not clear without further clarification from the Law Commission itself, and that the longish report titled Legal Framework: Gambling and Sports Betting Including Cricket in India could not be understood easily after the first plain reading. It is really troublesome if recommendations from the Law Commission are not straight forward and cannot be understood by most of the people who read it. How can the entire mediapersons not understand something written in plain simple English, maybe with a little bit of legal jargon put in? These people are used to reading court judgments and reporting them almost everyday without such confusion prevailing.

What can such confusing reports create was best demonstrated when a former Supreme Court judge, N Santosh Hegde recommended, based on the Law Commission report, that prostitution should also be legalised in the country as according to him “a person who thinks vices can be abolished by law is living in a fool’s paradise.” He might have been inspired by Justice Krishna Iyer, who in Raj Kapoor’s Satyam Shivam Sundarm case in 1979 had written, “Social scientists and spiritual scientists will broadly agree that man lives not alone by mystic, squints, ascetic chants and austere abnegation but by luscious love of Beauty, sensuous joy of companionship and moderate non-denial of normal demands of the flesh.”  

Coming to the question of the desirability of legalising gambling, betting, prostitution, etc., it is a matter for the people to decide in a democratic society and the role of the Law Commission is simply to recommend in plain words whether to legalise or not to legalise. In case there is a recommendation to change the status quo there must be convincing and cogent reasons mentioned in great detail so that it can be debated by the legislative body and decision made properly. How is any effective debate possible when the report itself can be interpreted in more than one way?

That has been a reasonable demand for a very long time from the people in India, and in most of the evolved jurisdictions of the world, that law and legal language should be made simple, colloquial, and easy to understand so that there is no confusion in the minds of the people who are bound by such legal provisions. In today’s world when a lot many things have been simplified and shortened with use of lesser words, particularly on the social media, which has been revolutionising the way people communicate, it is highly desirable that any such report should be in simple language, with a clearly marked operative portion, so that there is no confusion at all.

Brevity, after all, is the soul of wit.

The author is a professor at IIM-A,akagarwal@iima.ac.in