For the people

It is an immensely reassuring moment. In taking note of the ongoing investigation by this paper into the illegal construction by the capital’s rich and powerful, and in urging the government to act on the evidence thus placed in the public domain within a specified time frame, the Delhi High Court has put down that a matter of public interest will not be killed off or maimed by deliberate neglect and/or outright political sabotage. For this paper, this is a turn of events to draw immense encouragement from. Our investigative series and our exposes will go on, despite the backlash and even physical intimidation, such as the kind let loose on our reporters in the course of this campaign. But the high court’s intervention reaches deeper. Often, the Indian citizen, the ordinary man and woman, feels that the law of the land is a fiction at worst and at best a constraint only on those who have neither money nor influence to dodge it, stretch and maul it to their advantage. By recognising this legitimacy deficit and invoking it to make the case that the demolition drive should not be discriminatory, the court has signalled that the system is listening, it responds.

Delhi’s law-abiding citizen has had to confront an especially piquant sense of powerlessness ever since the MCD began the drive against unauthorised constructions that have systematically choked the city’s living spaces. As the bulldozers roamed, it soon became clear that resistance was growing, it would soon stall the drive set into motion by the courts in the first place. The resistance came not from the people. It came from the powerful politician-builder-official nexus, now threatening to remake the law, and an ordinance before that. What can the citizen do against odds such as these? What happens to the orphaned notion of ‘public good’? Must the citizen inevitably become more distrustful, more cynical, and even criminal, in a system that penalises those who follow the rules and rewards the lawbreakers? What do you do when the lawbreakers are also the lawmakers?

The law-abiding citizen is not defenceless in our system. The system is still spacious enough to give a hearing and a foothold to those who ask questions, interrogate its corruptions. When one institution fails in our system, another one kicks in, steps into the breach, upholds the faith. In a sense, this was also the unifying theme of the India Empowered series anchored by this paper. The Delhi High Court has stepped in to underline that grand idea.