In India, governments encourage lawlessness

They disobey courts in order to gain popularity and score against rivals

Keeping order and ensuring lawfulness may have once been considered the government’s duty. Courts and tribunals bring up issues of scarce popular appeal — the environment, public health, civic order, equal rights, humane treatment of animals and so on — when passing orders of prohibition or regulation. Governments are supposed to carry out such directions, nudging people towards the desired balance, not play politics by offering popular resistance as excuse.

It is not as though governments are failing in their duty; they are, instead, disobeying courts and tribunals in order to gain popularity and disconcert rivals. The protests against the Supreme Court ( pictured) ruling allowing women of reproductive age to enter the Sabarimala temple in Kerala could not have been organised without support from dominant political forces, although the state government in that case was trying to enforce the court’s direction. The excuse of “tradition” and conveniently construed notions of “culture” are repeatedly used to resist court orders: The Tamil Nadu government propounded an ordinance to evade the Supreme Court’s ban on jallikattu as a sport that was cruel to bulls. The situation in that case may have been different, even more complicated, than that in Kerala, but the impression that a court’s orders can be overridden by governments and powerful political parties is a dangerous one. Ruling politicians in India not only believe that they are above the law, but also that the law can be violated by the people to the rulers’ advantage.