Hartal horrors

The verdict of a division Bench of the Kerala High Court on violently enforced hartals will, of course, find wide support for the main poi...

The verdict of a division Bench of the Kerala High Court on violently enforced hartals will, of course, find wide support for the main point made. But, reports of the judgment would appear to reveal no remarkable judicial advance on the subject. It needs no special statutory wisdom to see that enforcement of any hartal by use of quot;force, intimidation or physical and mental coercionquot; amounts to quot;an unconstitutional actquot;. The question is how on earth any of this could have ever been considered a constitutionally permitted practice.

The answer is obvious: it is only the interests of a cynical political class that have dictated such a grossly and gravely distorted interpretation of the democratic right to protest. A non-political consensus on the crime there has always been, but an exemplary and deterrent punishment is what is yet to be prescribed. This has not been done by the court8217;s inclusion of the heavy-handedly enforced hartal in the definition of a bandh, which it had ruled unconstitutional before in a more widely noticed decision.

The political party or any of its outfits, seeking to hold the public to ransom in this manner, will only have to call a hartal by any other name. And, when have politicians found it hard to rename anything, ranging from streets to cities? Nor is much hope raised by the court8217;s directive to the Election Commission to treat instances of such violence as violations of the Representation of People8217;s Act and derecognise parties indulging in them. Practices which pass by the name of hartals and bandhs are so common that the commission may then end up by outlawing elections altogether. The court does suggest another step that is promising but still partial.

It has done right to direct the state government or a state-owned or controlled corporation to take immediate action for recovery of damages to their property in the course of a hartal. The citizens and their property, too, however, need and deserve similar protection. The organisers of hartals, along with their hordes and hirelings, must be punished, in other words, not only for burning buses and tampering with railway tracks but also for stoning shops and interfering with individuals8217; lives, not infrequently with fatal effects, too. The pretending protesters should not go unpunished, either, for the agony they cause to innocent people by denying them freedom of movement in the name of democracy and mass action. Precedence cannot be claimed for the right to stage a hartal over the one to rush a critical patient to a hospital, for example, and it is time such a claim is made severely punishable. Those responsible for the horrors of hartals should be made to pay for all that the citizens are made to suffer onsuch occasions.

There is no reason why justice of this kind cannot be done, if T.N. Seshan could make a success of the most uncontroversial measure of his term as the Chief Election Commissioner by punishing parties that appropriated use of citizens8217; property for their poster campaigns. Far more deterrent against the crime of the coercive hartal than any punishment, however, will be a recognition by the political offenders of the disservice they are doing to themselves as part of the democratic polity. They will be helping themselves and the system by avoiding hartal-like alternatives.