Bulldozing justice

Tavleen Singh writes: What we saw in Khargone was the law of the jungle

In all, 16 houses and 29 shops were demolished across four locations in the town following the clashes Sunday. (Screengrab)

Written by: Tavleen Singh

6 min readNew DelhiApr 20, 2022 12:04 PM IST First published on: Apr 17, 2022 at 03:59 AM IST

Let me start with a question. Would it be right for the homes of policemen and officials in charge of law and order in Khargone to have their houses bulldozed? I ask because when violence breaks out in a public place it is because the local administration fails, and it must be held accountable. But instead of the tortuous process of inquiry commissions that take decades to give their verdict, would it not be better to punish officials without due process?

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It is keeping this question in mind that we need to examine the demolition of the houses and properties of those charged with rioting in Khargone. What happened was outrageous because it was a violation of the fundamental principles that govern the rule of law, but public outrage has been subdued by the voices of those who believe that it serves Muslims right.

On social media I have heard jubilant ‘new’ Indians celebrate what happened in Khargone. I have engaged with them to point out that without the rule of law democratic countries become autocracies and what prevails is the law of the jungle. And the response has been that if the Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh had waited to punish rioters through due legal process they would have remained unpunished for years. This is true. And there is a solution that is so obvious I feel foolish repeating it here, but it clearly needs repetition.

The reason why the justice system moves so slowly is because it is broken and badly needs fixing. There are some obvious reforms that can be made effortlessly. The most necessary of these, in my view, is to scrap the ludicrous procedures that exist from colonial times. An example that comes immediately to mind is that of Aryan Khan. On the day that he was given bail he would have been able in another country to walk out of court immediately. But, not in India. Here he was taken back to the cell in which he was confined for a month and made to wait another two days for the procedures of his release to be completed. Why do these procedures exist?

Why does it take the courts 20 years of deliberations before punishing those responsible for the bombings that killed nearly 300 people in Mumbai in 1993? Why do judges need to write short novels to make their judgments? Why do the police need thousands of words to make charges that could be made in a few paragraphs? Why do lawyers succeed in delaying trials? Why are there no deadlines for trials to end? These are only some of the questions that need urgent answers, but the answer cannot be to establish the law of the jungle instead of the rule of law.

What we saw in Khargone was the law of the jungle. The Home Minister of Madhya Pradesh defended what happened on the grounds that those who throw stones will have their homes reduced to stones. Well, what would he say to the old lady whose picture appeared on the front page of this newspaper last week? Hasina Fakhroo is in her sixties and clearly too old to be a rioter, but her house was reduced to rubble before she could prove that it was built under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana.

Long is the list of cases in which people have been punished without due process, and the list does not begin with Narendra Modi coming to power as the Congress party would have us believe. An example from supposedly benign Congress times is that of Lalit Modi. All the cases that were made against him have been thrown out of court, but he was hounded out of India as a result of a shameful media trial in which those responsible for upholding the rule of law played an ugly part. More recently this happened in the Sushant Singh Rajput case where the media was manipulated through calculated leaks to turn his suicide into a murder case. A young woman’s life was destroyed by TV anchors who declared her guilty on primetime. Should these anchors have their homes bulldozed? When should we stop using bulldozers?

Once we give officials the right to bulldoze the homes of suspected rioters and the right to seize the properties of alleged offenders, we establish the rule of the jungle. Once we allow income-tax inspectors to raid the homes of alleged tax evaders without proof that they have evaded taxes, we do the same. This is a practice that has been going on much too long.

What has changed since Narendra Modi took office is that somehow it is always Muslims that end up spending months in jail in cases that are bailable. It is shameful that this happened to a standup comedian for a joke he had not cracked. Shameful that student leaders and journalists, nearly always Muslims, spend months in jail on usually dubious charges. Let us then ask what happens to a country in which senior political leaders and high officials show total disdain for the rule of law on the fallacious grounds that the process of justice takes too long. The answer is that they are in clear violation of the Constitution of India, and the consequences are grim. When the rule of law is weakened, it weakens democracy because the rule of law has to be sacrosanct in democratic countries.