Opinion Tavleen Singh writes: Gangsterism instead of justice

If ‘new’ India is going to become a country in which the rule of law is ground into the dust by bulldozers, then we must accept that this new India will not be called a democracy.

atiq ahmed tavleen singh yogi adityanath

What has shocked me most is that it is not just Yogi’s semi-literate cheerleaders who have celebrated the execution of the two mobsters but learned editors and Hindutva intellectuals. (File)

Tavleen Singh

April 23, 2023 03:18 PM IST First published on: Apr 23, 2023 at 07:50 AM IST

It is a shame that the vigilante execution of two mobsters while they were in police custody is being seen in isolation. It should be seen as part of an old narrative whose message is disdain for the rule of law. The only new element is that Yogi Adityanath does not hesitate to publicly show his total contempt for the processes that constitute the rule of law. So, after Atiq Ahmed and his brother were shot dead, he vowed to grind ‘all mafias into dust’. The Chief Minister knows that he is beloved for inventing bulldozer justice. So popular is his bulldozer justice that it is being adopted by other BJP chief ministers. But does anyone in the higher echelons of our most powerful political party know that democracy dies if the rule of law dies?

The Prime Minister never tires of reminding the world that India is the ‘mother of democracy’. He revels so proudly in this dodgy boast that it is written on millions of posters welcoming G20 delegates that are currently plastered on the walls, billboards, railway stations and bus stops of Delhi and Mumbai. This could be a good time for him to examine why democratic countries are more respected than countries where some tinpot dictator or some two-bit Ayotollah decides whom to punish, how and when. The vilest of today’s dictators, Vladimir Putin, has just jailed a Wall Street Journal journalist on charges of espionage. These charges could keep Evan Gershkovich in jail for a very long time. Sadly, in India similar false charges have landed Muslim journalists, activists, and student leaders in jail ever since Hindutva became the dominant political idea.

But contempt for the rule of law began in pre-Hindutva times. The first time I saw this happen was in 1984 when Rajiv Gandhi’s government ensured that the killers involved in the state-sponsored pogrom against the Sikhs were allowed to go unpunished. The next time this happened was also on his watch when policemen of the Provincial Armed Constabulary were allowed to go unpunished for shooting to death in a closed police van more than seventy unarmed Muslims during the Hashimpura riots.

Those who are horrified that murderers and rapists responsible for the Naroda Patiya massacre in Ahmedabad in 2002 were all acquitted last week should remember what happened in 1984. Once the process of weakening the rule of law begins a new kind of justice system gets created. So, we are now witness to a time when municipal officials and policemen are permitted to use bulldozers to tear down the homes of suspects before they are convicted of any crime in a court. The need for massive judicial reforms could not be more urgent.

It is because due process takes so very long that ordinary Indians have lost faith in the rule of law. Whenever I have tried to explain to Yogi Adityanath’s cheerleaders that what he is doing is wrong, they demand to know why criminals and gangsters should not simply be shot. Why should taxpayers’ money pay for them to be in jail for decades simply because it takes so long to bring them to justice? It took more than twenty years to convict the jihadi terrorists responsible for the bombings in Mumbai in 1993 that killed 257 people and injured hundreds of others. That old cliché about justice delayed being justice denied is true.

It is beyond tragic that so many years after that horrendous attack on Mumbai the criminal justice system continues to move at that same criminally slow pace. Anyone who has seen the inside of Indian courtrooms knows that they continue to look as if the 21st century has not yet arrived. Why do judges need thousands of words to express simple judgements? Why is the paperwork so voluminous that the simple process of releasing someone from a prison cell can take days instead of minutes? Why is justice so expensive that it remains unavailable to an ordinary person?

These are all things that have weakened respect for the rule of law. But this cannot mean that we should now start shooting people dead in the streets as a way of delivering instant justice. India’s greatest achievement is that it has managed through turmoil and turbulence to keep democracy alive in the past 75 years. What Indians are beginning to forget is that democracy will not survive for very long if we replace the rule of law with the rule of the bulldozer. When the state itself starts to behave like a gangster what hope is there that gangsters will be prevented from going about their murderous deeds?

What has shocked me most is that it is not just Yogi’s semi-literate cheerleaders who have celebrated the execution of the two mobsters but learned editors and Hindutva intellectuals. These wise men have come out in open support of vigilante justice and openly reviled those who oppose it for being, horror of horrors, liberals, and leftists. If ‘new’ India is going to become a country in which the rule of law is ground into the dust by bulldozers, then we must accept that this new India will not be called a democracy. It will be a country that will be compared with autocracies like Russia and China and theocracies like Iran and Afghanistan. Is this the new India we want? It is time to ask this question.