KAFKA’S LABYRINTH
James Tooley’s Comeuppance exposes the venality in India’s judicial apparatus
Soon after Franz Kafka’s death in 1924, the writer’s literary executor Max Brod ignored his friend’s instructions, and published a slim novel written a decade earlier. ‘Der Process’ (The Trial) is about the travails of Josef K, who finds himself inextricably trapped by legal bureaucratism. He doesn’t know why he’s been arrested, or how to defend himself, or even whether it’s possible to escape. In ‘Comeuppance, James Tooley outlines a similarly labyrinthine experience down the rabbit hole of India’s legal system, after being unexpectedly accosted at his hotel in Hyderabad in 2014. Mrs T Mantra, Deputy Superintendent, Criminal Investigation Department, showed up in a sari “draped so low that it often fell off her shoulder”. Tooley is initially urged by his interrogator, “Don’t worry. Make a statement from memory. We just need something to close the case.” But then the next day she showed up with “six men in a triangle behind her” and took the aghast 54-year-old off to jail.
At the time of Tooley’s arrest, he was a well-known libertarian academic (at the University of Newcastle on Tyne) and entrepreneur (he is Chairman of chainschool companies in Ghana and India), was being accompanied by an Indian girlfriend, and had “more or less” lived in Hyderabad for years. Given all that experience, it’s hard to compute the succession of blunders he made after falling into Mrs. Mantra’s clutches, purportedly for failing to realize it would be a problem that he’d previously set up (and then disbanded) a trust which received funds from abroad in contravention of Indian foreign currency regulations. Whether or not Tooley is actually as much a guileless naïf as portrayed in ‘Comeuppance’ there is no denying the plausibility of his descriptions of naked, pervasive venality, inertia and extortion in India’s judicial apparatus. Mrs Mantra wants a sizable chunk of cash. Everyone else in the system is fully aware. The hapless Brit finds abysmal representation in a series of deficient advocates. Then he gets physically threatened. “You have no fucking choice,” he’s told by his blackmailer’s goon, who “opened his jacket to reveal a handgun tucked in his belt.”
‘Comeuppance’ proceeds to underline many of the most shameful aspects of India’s overburdened and antiquated legal framework, where some 67% of all prisoners languish “undertrial” for up to three years without ever facing court. The overwhelming majority of these unfortunates is Muslim, Dalit and Adivasi, far out of proportion to their numbers in society. There is also a desperate deficiency in legal aid, which is needed most by precisely this segment of prisoners. Meanwhile, bribery and corruption run rampant. As Tooley is eventually told by a friend, “That’s the only way you get things done in India. Money or power. Those are your only choices.” That is when our protagonist realized, “I too had to go the power route.”
Tooley has influential friends. It is hard to imagine why he didn’t immediately make the necessary phone call earlier – the stalemate was broken by IV Subba Rao, the current secretary to Vice President Venkaiah Naidu. He knew Tooley well, and his entry changed everything. There is a disheartening shuffle of papers from one officer to another, that persists until a hairraising denouement. This gives Tooley the space to wax libertarian. He quotes David Boaz, “those who administer the law should have minimal discretion, because discretionary power is the very evil that the rule of law is intended to protect.” This leads to his own realization, “if there was less discretion given to the police over the ‘who, what and when’ of prosecution, then police corruption could begin to wither on the vine.” Dubious as that analysis may be, it’s impossible to ignore the bottom line: “India’s affront to the rule of law” causes untold misery and anguish.