Law and Justice

22/3/81

‘All the laws are for propertied people,’ – a catchy but uninformed statement. The statement is not untrue, but its implications are mischievous and dangerous.

The need for laws arose as a result of the need to sort out claims of various people. If there are no claims, there need be no laws. The proviso being absurd, the derivation is likewise preposterous.

If people should engage in a mutually recriminating and destructive strife to secure what each person in his secluded thinking considers impartial justice, the very foundation of the organized society will crack. Any attempt to take mankind back to its primitive barbarity has to be deprecated by peace-loving people. Violence or anarchy cannot ensure justice.

May 11, 2015

Law

Law is for the propertied, the guilty and the corrupt. Only they have to have a brush with the law. They become well acquainted with the legal system. They know its weakness and loopholes. They hobnob with the law makers and law givers. They know they can’t have all, and hence ready to share their wealth to let law be on their side. Peace loving citizens with no desire for possessions or wrong doing do not go to law.

Turning law on its head!

The principles of law must be capable of delivering timely justice – quick judgment and swift and fair execution. It is not enough if they appear grand and noble from the cool musings of the unaffected elite. If, for every suspected culprit that goes scot-free because his innocence has to be honoured as his birth right, many other real innocent people will suffer, something is rotten about the principle. Such fine principles can work in a society which cares for dharma. Where people have become mercenary and crime a commodity you see traded in the bazaar, they will only embolden the goons.

Why do rapists, willful defaulters and murderers walk free in society? It is because the basics of law suits them and they can bend it to their glory.

(This was written before the Hyderabad model of justice.)

This is from a reply to a friend:

The poor and weak always bear the brunt of social, fiscal and legal action. They toil for the rich and subsidise the rich. The subsidy the rich get from the poor must far outstrip what they get from the state. That is through history. That is why the poor are enticed with a superior place in heaven where investigative journalism has not reached. It is no better in welfare states and communist states.

That is why human civilisation is about constant tussle and struggle and vigil and fight.

I am a pessimist about universal justice and optimist about individual optimisation of good living through honest effort, not if everyone wants to be a Nirav Modi or Choksi or Mallya.

Justice is not equal and impartial.

When the 'me-too' allegations were at its peak, several musicians came under cloud and there were vociferous cries that they must be banned and ostracised. No one bothered about their reputation. No one knows the truth and all of them are back in business.

When a gun was fired near a place of a prominent person, there was a hue and cry, but it turned out that it was accidental.

When something happens to us, it is always serious. That is natural.

"The least pain in our little finger gives us more concern and uneasiness than the destruction of millions of our fellow-beings. William Hazlitt."