By: V.Sundaram, I.A.S.
January 14, 2005

“In the early morning of the 21st century we seem to be afflicted by a gigantic and progressive power failure. Powerlessness of the common man and the sense of powerlessness of the man in the street are indeed the environmental disease of India.”

The recent arrests and police enquiries in many cases like the nationally famous Jayalakshmi case in Tamil Nadu have made me imagine a sad situation whereby the very living of a common person even in the privacy of his simple home or cottage is in jeopardy today.

I have been inspired and motivated to write this article by the following deathless statement issued by Mahatma Gandhi, the Father of Our Nation, on the day on which he set out on his famous march to Dandi on the Gulf of Cambay in April 1930:

“I repudiate this law and regard it as my sacred duty to break the mournful monotony of compulsory peace that is choking the heart of the nation for want of a free vent”

I am also reminded of what Walter Mehring, a prolific German writer during the fast loose years of the Weimar Republic, felt in 1974 about Hitler and the ways of his grisly gang in 1933. He said that, he was dealing with “highly cultivated barbarians, technically trained primitives and uniformed cannibals”. An average citizen today feels the same thing about the atmosphere created by the Government

Abraham Lincoln spoke of the Government of the people, by the people, for the people. Our politicians too speak the same language on all public platforms but in actual practice they set an example every moment every day of Government of criminals, by criminals, for criminals. This ugly phenomenon is often described ad nauseam in detail by the elitist mafia of mass media as “criminalization of politics”. Every citizen is of the view that no government in India can ever be expected to be brutally sincere; it can only be sincerely brutal!

Why should I not imagine a situation where an individual should be cautious even to greet his neighbour in the morning lest he will be caught for enquiry or otherwise by the police connecting him with his neighbour’s acts of commission and omission. I am carefully avoiding the word ‘emission’ that in the present context can always be viewed as a Himalayan crime by the police. A father cannot talk to his daughter on the telephone and convey some family matters, as he is worried that the police may record his conversation. In such an atmosphere of unimagined and unimaginable terror (!) every citizen who has the temerity apart from stupidity to call himself a Hindu, has to be doubly careful even in making his usual periodical visits to the temple because any visit to any temple can add up to the originally stipulated and desired sum total of circumstantial evidence being gathered with such avidity and thoroughness by the police.

Against this background, I cannot help visualizing a comically real situation in which the following suggestions and useful tips might be offered to every citizen for guarding himself against unforeseen, unprovoked, unwarranted, unjustified nocturnal raids and arrests by the police:

a) All newly married couples should switch over from nuptial nights to ‘nuptial days’. Days are safer than nights as mid-night arrests have become the accepted order of the day. A leading jurist friend of mine told me that ‘Optimisation of Arrest’ means arresting a person on a Friday midnight as part of a midnight swoop.

b) No male Teacher or Professor should talk to his female students unless his voice is being recorded by an officer not below the rank of a Sub Inspector of Police. These cassettes will come in handy for the police to foist cases upon all in the manner and measure required from time to time.. I would even suggest that it would not be difficult to prescribe a deterrent penalty for non-compliance---- an indefinite term of internment in an unspecified place under many of the specific Acts now available and/or to be created in accordance with the whims and fancies of the draconian democratic law of majority absolutism and fundamentalism. This glorious process will no doubt all the time be marked by great human sympathy, kindness and consideration to the accused/afflicted.

c) Every citizen should make sure not to get entangled in anything warranting police enquiry or arrest, because every Public Prosecutor will be in a state of combat readiness like our duty-conscious jawans in the Himalayan Heights of India on the Pakistan-China border, to describe you as a ‘criminal’ with boisterous enthusiasm bordering on contempt of Court before which he is arguing, even before the trial begins.

d) Every citizen should be ready to accept the solemn fact that even a person indicted by the High Court on charges of criminal offence would be appointed as the officer in-charge of enquiry in selected criminal cases and as regards these special cases whatever method he applies during the enquiry and whoever is picked up by him with or without reason should submit himself/herself for such an enquiry without a murmur.

e) If you happen to be a female, make sure you don’t pay a visit to any famous temple or divine place lest you might be caught by the police. The police throughout the country have a right to be democratically neutral between moral traffic and immoral traffic.

f) If you use a land-line phone, may be you are safe; but if you use a cell telephone you run the risk of being subjected to enquiries for major offences like murder, rape, armed dacoity etc. Normally use of land telephones should land you only in minor offences even if you are a known depredator.

g) In order to earn the permanent goodwill of the police so as to ensure yourself against unwarranted or illegal arrests, the safest and the most legal course open to every citizen is to join a political party. And if at all a case is registered against you, you can very well call it a foisted one based on political vendetta and come out on bail without any legal hurdle and lead a luxurious life by holding the office of a Cabinet Minister. There may be one or two exceptions to this rule also, but those one or two unfortunate people as far as reasons (why?) go should be viewed as victims of mere fate.

You can say that I have allowed my imagination to run riot. Such a riotous opportunity is happily given to us in an endless manner by our State and its agencies day in and day out in all parts of our country. They provide either endless joy to somebody or endless worry to so many putting us all in a joyous(!) state of reverie or imagination. In this context, I am reminded of what Oscar Wilde wrote in prison in 1891: “Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the thinker or the dreamer”. I am of the view that for the dumb millions in India we have to substitute the word STATE for Society.

I would conclude with a poem about Tamil Nadu:

Let nothing be called natural about me
I am condemned to an Age of Bloody Confusion
An Age of Ordered Disorder
An Age of Planned Caprice
And De-humanised Humanity
Lest all things
Be held unalterable!!

V.Sundaram, I.A.S.