Did Union Carbide boss Warren Andersen take that plane out of India and fly away from India’s law keepers because India’s laws were badly written or because they were poorly implemented? Does one blame the wording of the laws of the land for Mr Andersen’s bail-out, or the incompetence, collusion or what you will of the Rajiv Gandhi government in New Delhi and the Arjun Singh government in Bhopal?
Going by the ongoing discourse on the drafting of the Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage Bill, it would appear that the rights of India’s citizens are forever determined by the wording of the nation’s laws. One word here protects the citizen from depredation and worse, one word there surrenders sovereignty forever. If laws and rights were edible there would be no hunger in India, and every citizen of this great democracy would have been the most politically, socially and economically empowered person in the world.
For every member of Parliament who spends hours arguing on the floor of the House and the television studios in support of a better-worded law, there is a multiple that happily breaks the law with impunity. An MP’s idea of parliamentary privilege seems to be that one is entitled to break the very law one has enacted! Consider the fuss India’s VIPs (very important persons, in case you did not know) and its VVIPs (very, very important persons) make about security frisking at airports. While private airports are replacing state-owned ones, the privileges have not gone away. So, the private airport operator is obliged to provide a car on demand for the VIP MP to ride from the terminal to the aircraft. So many members of Parliament, not to mention ministers in the government, devote so much of their time in defending the interests of business persons who have broken the law, while at the same time making a fuss about laxity in the wording of the law that is then broken!
India’s ‘illegal miners’ are the darlings of politicians from across the political divide, and many billionaires who habitually break laws are feted and courted by MPs. But, standing in Parliament and participating in a debate on the very law that these worthies are happy to break, the distinguished member of Parliament will berate the government of the day for some badly drafted clause that may help errant business persons to escape the mythical ‘long arm of the law’! Every political party happily and willingly participates in this charade. Even the Left parties, which make much of a muchness when it comes to legal assurances to business persons, quite happily break laws that they see as the rules of a ‘bourgeois state’.
If such is the contempt for laws in practice, as opposed to the devotion to their drafting in theory, the attitude of lawmakers to people’s rights is even more deplorable. Consider the example of Right to Education, a constitutional guarantee that India’s lawmakers enthusiastically voted for this year. Is it because of the absence of such a constitutional right that over the past three decades the people of West Bengal have not attained 100 per cent literacy despite having lived under the caring gaze of a communist party government? There is now much ado about a right to food security bill. Is it the absence of such a bill that keeps so many even in states like Kerala and Bengal underfed? Feed the hungry more laws, rights and all those words that parliamentarians find objectionable, and India will be a well-fed nation!