 "PM Modi, Amit Shah, Narendra Modi, Shah")
By Mihir Sharma
If there’s one thing that India’s government likes to say it stands for, it’s “decolonization.” Delivering his annual speech for Independence Day earlier this week from the ramparts of Delhi’s historic Red Fort, Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke of his time in power as a liberation from a “thousand years” of slavery to external powers, and of how he was laying the foundation for a thousand-year state that would “return” India to its past golden age.
Ironically, given the Mughal antecedents of the fort from which he spoke, Modi’s phrasing lumped together the first decades of Indian independence, the couple of hundred years of the British Raj, and the much longer period that Islam has existed in the nation. It carried the unsubtle implication that India’s Muslims were part of its colonial baggage, no different from the laws and language the British left behind. It also implied that India’s governments before Modi took power in 2014 were complicit in perpetuating foreign influence through the education system and forms of governance. The current government, in other words, would be the first in the country’s history to really throw off the shackles of colonization.
This isn’t just rhetoric. An example of how decolonization is being put into practice, warts and all, had just been provided to us on Aug. 11. Without any consultation — or, in fact, any word that they had been working on it — Amit Shah, Modi’s most trusted lieutenant and minister of home affairs, introduced three new laws in the dying hours of the monsoon session of Parliament.
These were given mellifluous names in the complex, Sanskrit-inflected official Hindi that India’s ruling elite prefers; and they were meant to replace the three codes that have for over a century governed how criminals are charged, what constitutes a criminal offence, and how evidence is handled. Shah argued that the “laws that will be repealed were formed to strengthen and protect the British” and their replacements would have “an Indian spirit and ethos” to shake us free of “mental servitude” to the Raj.
The symbolism, as celebrations of the first 75 years as an independent nation concluded, was obvious. The Indian Penal Code, for one, was drafted in part by the writer and bureaucrat Thomas Babington Macaulay, famous in India for his advocacy of English-language education, and renaming it away from English is no doubt a source of satisfaction for anyone still smarting from things that Macaulay said or wrote in the 1830s.
The deeper question, however, is what the purpose of these new laws is other than to strike a blow for decolonization. I’m sure there is a lot that needs to change to bring Indian criminal law into the 21st century. And there will, no doubt, be some major changes buried in the small print: Lawyers are already poring over the new punishments for “endangering the sovereignty, unity and integrity of India,” for example. But many fear that the new laws largely borrow the language of the old, while adding a layer of ambiguity to fresh offences that would reduce, rather than increase, individual liberty.
The government has a weakness for unleashing giant new changes on an unsuspecting country without any real consideration for how they will be implemented. This was most visible in its sudden move, back in 2016, to withdraw 86% of India’s currency from circulation. There’s an element of that fiasco in this decision, as well.
The replacement of 19th-century laws by new ones might read well in theory — except criminal codes are, in a sense, living laws. They have been amended, interpreted and reinterpreted by legislators, police and judges for decades. Major changes have been introduced in the past, mostly after expert commissions and hearings and months of public debate. Each of these has taken a while, sometimes years, to percolate down to the tens of thousands of overworked cops and judges who have to use them every day. How is India’s creaking law enforcement system supposed to relearn everything all at once? It’s fair to worry that, once again, the nation’s leaders are putting symbolism above good sense.
Even the renaming of the laws into Hindi may not be the best idea. The chief minister of the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu — which, like many other Indian states, does not use Hindi as an official language — has already protested, claiming that the imposition of Hindi through these new laws is “recolonization in the name of decolonisation.” It seems that not everyone in India agrees that we’re on the threshold of a thousand-year golden age.
Disclaimer: This is a Bloomberg Opinion piece, and these are the personal opinions of the writer. They do not reflect the views of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper
