Our injustice system

Delhi blast acquittals raise a question: When will politics go beyond my favourite innocent vs yours?

JUST BEFORE THE 2014 election, I had a haunting political conversation with a young student from Bihar. We were discussing politics, the future of secularism and the political fate of Bihar. Suddenly the student got animated and said that he could not care less about secularism. He did not much care about the way the Congress party trotted out Gandhi and Nehru to buttress their ideological pedigree. He was also deeply suspicious of the big ideological battles surrounding secularism. “They throw secularism at me like a stone,” he said at one point. He then asked pointedly, “Can any political party look me in the eye and answer this question. If there is a riot, terror attack or any violence, directed against any group in any state, will the state pursue the perpetrators impartially, without any consideration of caste, religious community or political affiliation? Will the real perpetrators be brought to justice? Second, as a young Muslim student, can anyone assure me that whenever there is a terror attack, the police will not round up innocent young Muslim men indiscriminately?” He had in mind the case of 70-odd young Muslim men in Andhra who were falsely accused, and then subsequently released. He was quite measured: The police has a difficult job to do. But our secularism breaks down the minute our institutions are put under pressure. This, he argued, was true, regardless of which political party was in power. Congress justice was no better than BJP justice, on these two questions at any rate.

These two powerful questions should haunt our political system. At one level, the questions were obvious. But what stood in this articulation was the search for a definition of secularism that was pointedly institutional. Secularism is not the proclamation of grand ideology, the noblesse oblige to protect minorities, or the invocation of historical pedigree. Its true meaning can be redeemed only in the day to day workings of our institutions, particularly police and the courts. It has to permeate through all the quotidian procedures by which truth is produced in a court of law: How we present narratives, treat witnesses, follow procedures and come to presumptive judgments about circumstantial evidence. No political party could look this student in the eye and assure him that our institutions