PROTECTING CITIZENS FROM HARASSMENT

The Supreme Court of India has, with its customary wisdom, declined to plunge into the roiling politics of this country by ordering a probe into what are termed as the “Sahara diaries”, even though another company is mentioned in the material. Certainly Prashant Bhushan has made a global name for himself in battling governmental and private corruption, but in this matter, no progress seems to have been made by him in securing more evidence to back his claim that the material submitted to the court called for a full-dress probe. Such an investigation would take months to complete, if not years, and would consume much of the time of the government and agencies, all this in the glare of newspaper headlines and the hectoring of television anchors, each of whom would compete with the others in order to dissect every presumed detail of the controversy. It is impossible to claim that such a process would not harass and harry the individual tasked with leading the administrative structure of the country, Prime Minister Narendra Damodardas Modi. The Supreme Court is correct in ruling that such an investigation and its attendant consequences should have a very high bar of proof before any formal process of investigation gets launched. Given the frenzy of commentary over matters relating to corruption, there has evolved a trend of prosecuting first and asking questions afterwards. If there is a suicide at a school, those running the institution are marched off to jail, howsoever tangential or indeed nonexistent their relation to the unfortunate occurrence. Despite its claim of being the world’s biggest (in terms of population) democracy, the reality is that India is a paradise for the police, with its laws being numerous enough and fuzzy enough to send citizens to prison on the basis of evidence and charges that would get dismissed in democracies of greater vintage. Hopefully, Government of India, as well as the state governments, will accept the spirit of the Supreme Court order and restrain themselves from prosecuting all and sundry on the basis of unsubstantiated charges.

All too often, sundry governments have used still extant colonial laws in order to themselves harass and harry the inconvenient. The legal system in India is of such complexity that once a citizen enters its coils, years may elapse before he or she gets out of formal proceedings, and in many cases, serve jail time and have careers and finances ruined. The Supreme Court needs to see that the judicial machinery ensures that a high bar of proof be reached before formal processes get initiated and that they avoid going along with the colonial instinct of much of the bureaucracy, which is to chargesheet, prosecute and even jail first and collect evidence thereafter.

There is of course need for accountability, but the present set of procedures and regulations have not ensured greater probity in the layers of governance which affect the citizen. The creation of more layers of supervision and regulation would almost certainly be as ineffective in reducing the problem of corruption, as the numerous laws and agencies that have been created since 1947 have been. Indeed, corruption has increased in step with the number of regulations and the size of the anti-corruption machinery, several of whose components are themselves the most corrupt elements in the governance system. Thanks to the dysfunctional system of governance inherited from the period of British rule and lovingly maintained thereafter by succeeding “independent” governments, the only major economy where a citizen of India fails to achieve excellence is in India itself. It is no accident that there are no Science Nobel prize persons working in India, only those settled abroad. Each day is an obstacle race against a maze of regulations and governmental discretion, any portion of which could be used by the malevolent to target a hapless citizen. The Sahara diaries judgement of the Supreme Court of India will hopefully be a precursor to the entire system of governance in India, moving from the colonial mode of punishing first and asking questions (if at all) later. Every citizen, including certainly the Prime Minister of India, deserves the protection of a high bar of evidence being crossed before being subjected to formal investigation and its attendant consequences, rather than become enmeshed within the coils of the judicial machinery in the country on the basis of flimsy evidence and innuendo.