Time for raj dharma

The utterly villainous killing of Sohrabuddin Sheikh and his wife Kausar Bano on November 22, 2005, by policemen""IPS officers, mind, not just some low-ranking functionaries""is one more in the long line of such murders. It shows, yet again how, slowly, but not altogether imperceptibly, India is becoming a jungle in which the State rules as the supreme predator. The rule of law, on which we once prided ourselves, is gradually becoming a thing of the past. An accretion of big and small acts, ranging from murder to extortion to petty harassment, all committed by the agents of the State for one reason or the other, is reaching proportions that should send shivers down all our spines. After all, this sort of thing has been common enough in several states. In the Northeast such killings by the State (extra-judicial terminations, to use the polite phrase) have been common for a long time. The same thing has happened in Kashmir on an even larger scale. In Andhra Pradesh, Bihar and Chhattisgarh it has led to the Naxal problem. The brutality of the Tamil Nadu police is well known. West Bengal has its own version of such thuggery. Where next?

There are three, not mutually exclusive, ways of tackling the problem of a state that is turning murderous. One is the legal process, which is under way. The second is the administrative process for dealing with officially sanctioned goons but this is not in view. And the third is the political process, which is perhaps the most important of all because, regardless of what their disclaimers, almost everything can be traced to the acts of omissions and commissions by politicians when they are in power. The truly frightening thing is that they all behave in the same way when they come to power. What was exceptional during the Emergency has almost become standard operating procedure.

At the root of it is a simple but distressing fact: regardless of the party, the political class, in spite of claiming to represent the people, represents nothing but itself. The result is the complete inability of politicians to distinguish between private political objectives and public means used to achieve them. It matters little whether it is the ambassador car with the red number plates (the lowest symbol of status because the red light is a notch above) or killing at the hands of IPS officers""the issue is the same, namely, the easy assumption that when in power, they are somehow above the law. Every political party in power uses the instruments of the state as its private resource, whether banks, financial institutions or the police. It is just that in the case of the police, the practice assumes altogether more sinister dimensions. Clearly, exemplary punishment is needed. But while such punishment is possible at legal and administrative levels, who will punish the politicians? It is futile to say that the electorate will when it has been brainwashed in the way it has in Gujarat. The solution lies in the hands of the party leaders. Atal Bihari Vajpayee once spoke of raj dharma. The time has come to observe it.