The unlawful culture

By Manabi Majumdar

IN HIS powerful novel `Yama,' the Russian novelist Alexander Kuprin talked about the age-old practice of prostitution and ruefully commented that ``the horror is just in this that there is no horror''. At a different time, in a different place (a village near Muzaffarnagar in Uttar Pradesh to be precise), the public lynching of two young lovers evinces the same shocking reality of the quiet tolerance of a heinous act. Active as well as passive encouragement for the crime allegedly came from the whole village, otherwise divided along lines of caste, class, religion and ethnicity. It is conceivable that the residents hardly agree on very many fundamental issues; for example, they perhaps fiercely contest the democratic norms that children of all communities in the village should have access to basic educational opportunities; that all should be able to freely draw water from the same village well; and that all social groups deserve to be treated with the same human dignity. Simply put, this is perhaps a `typical' village where inter-group conflicts over natural, social and economic assets abound.

Yet, according to press reports, the villagers were united in their collective aversion to a boy and a girl of the same village, of two different castes, falling in love. The law of the land which enshrines a fundamental right to life for every citizen and which does not deny a right to love, allowed them, in principle, to live and love. But the cultural practice of village exogamy (which practically prohibits marriage between young men and women of the same village, with the hidden purpose of denying women their land rights) in this case took precedence over the core constitutional guarantees for respecting basic liberties of all. It is alleged that not only the young couple's parents and relatives, but even the local arm of the state, including panchayat and police officials, overtly or covertly approved of the crime. More recently, a Dalit woman was paraded naked in a village in Karnataka's Bellary district. Such instances abound.

We often accept such flagrant violations of the law as a `cultural reality', degenerating into everyday trivia, not sufficiently momentous for us to react. Indeed, many of us (especially the educated middle and upper middle class `have- enoughs' amongst us) routinely compromise the `rule of law', for the sake of even `small' comforts and privileges. We violate traffic rules with impunity, jump the queue in banks and post- offices, bribe public officials to avoid cumbersome bureaucratic `paraphernalia' and to get things done out of turn. The same tribe that earns the badge of `model minority' in western countries, demonstrating extreme deference to even laws against `jay-walking', does not hesitate to openly and routinely flout all kinds of rules within its own national boundaries. Is this infringement prompted by some pressing emergency need? Or is it all owing to the economics of shortage? Neither provides a satisfactory explanation.

But why do we care about a `rule-based' society? After all, an `order' seems to be emerging out of chaos and corruption in this functional anarchy. But it is because of this routine, endemic and everyday practice of lawlessness and tolerance thereof that `small' crimes accumulate into `big' ones; we get habituated to accepting criminal offences such as tax evasion, infanticide, domestic violence, and episodes of public lynching as part of our normal experience.

There was a time when the country's developmental prospects were sought to be assessed primarily in terms of economic growth, industrial expansion, macro-economic stability and so on, to the relative reflect of the importance of institutional micro- foundations of macro-structures. Today, however, the emerging wisdom is that institutional arrangements matter. Unlike before, the political, institutional and legal environments of a developing country have become focal points of research, policy and action. Issues such as transparency, the rule of law and governance are no longer considered insignificant in explaining underdevelopment or development; on the contrary, these factors are being placed at the centre of analyses, understanding and action.

Admittedly, one cannot afford to suffer from an excessive confidence in the Government as it has often failed to implement laws. Moreover, the law-makers are often the law-breakers. But our justified scepticism about the integrity of law enforcers need not translate into a blanket dismissal of all kinds of legal restraints. Without a rule-based civic culture our civil society will remain highly `uncivil'.

Here, two points are also in order vis-a-vis perceptions of the changing role of the state as well as the ascending prominence of `localism' in the current development discourse. It is increasingly being claimed that the state-led development model of the past is dead; in its place people-centred developmental initiatives have gained new prominence. Correlatively, local experiences, local efforts and local participation seem to be construed as unqualified virtues. But as the gruesome killing of the young couple in Uttar Pradesh suggests, grassroots initiatives are not always benign, let alone emancipatory, especially when rooted in pernicious cultural practices.

In the end, we have to agree that accountability to the people is a function of robustness of democracy, rule of law, and transparency and not of any particular layer of government. It is precisely because of this reason that we need checks and balances across different levels of government so that citizens unjustly treated at one level have redress at other levels. Therefore, the constitutional system of law, should inform and implicate every locality, every region and every supra-local centre of power in the country.

The purpose of adherence to rules is not merely to gain some practical advantages (e.g., we achieve better coordination if we obey traffic rules) but more importantly to limit ourselves against our own excesses. Such self-limiting commitments may prevent us from displaying our unfettered power and thereby can make us accept the democratic claim that everyone is to be treated as an equal. The endemic and rampant infringement of rules in our society is symptomatic of a deeper malaise, namely, the existence of entrenched inequalities of many hues. It is inextricably linked with our notions of hierarchy. It seems that there is a society-wide complicity in perpetuating disparities. We are social partners in according special privileges to ourselves while denying the same to others. We lack the democratic sentiment of protecting some basic entitlements for all. Instead, we revel in the idea of one-upmanship.

Consider a very mundane example. In our country the majority of people are pedestrians; only a minority owns private vehicles. Yet the pedestrian majority hardly gets the right of way; `the power of wheels' takes its dominance for granted. In the western societies, in contrast, the majority uses cars and only a handful minority travels on foot. Yet everybody accepts the pedestrians' right of way. It is part of their culture to respect those in relatively more vulnerable positions and therefore in greater need of collective sympathy and support. Hence, for example, the special facilities in their public transport for children, senior citizens and the disabled.

Our social behaviour, on the other hand, is not driven by assessment of relative needs, but is a function of our positions in the social hierarchy. Reflecting on our `culture of insensitivity and disorderliness' is hard to separate from a keen interest in its reform. An acknowledgement of the chronic nature of our irreverence to rules - big and small - is perhaps the first step in that direction. We need to double and quadruple efforts to educate ourselves about the danger of relegating our unlawful `code of conduct' to the status of everyday nothingness. If we do not swear to uphold the `rule of law', the country's development will remain ever depressed and the volume of small and big crimes will keep piling up.

(The writer is with the Madras Institute of Development Studies, Chennai.)

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