Dwindling checks and balances

-->

By Rajkamal Rao

Go back to India Live!

Poor civic sense and a rapidly deteriorating moral fabric, pushed by the liberal media, are contributing to India's societal decline.

The public and media attention reacting to the horror in Delhi has mostly focused on new laws and a strengthening of our criminal justice system.  The liberals and progressives who have dominated this debate have suddenly found far restrictive societies such as the Middle East to be appealing.  “If the girl was sent to Singapore for ‘better treatment', the rapists should be sent to Saudi Arabia for ‘better justice’”, said a popular message making rounds on numerous social media feeds.

This kind of public reaction is natural.  When the Sandy Hook massacre of school children happened around the same time last month in the United States, the overwhelming call was for stricter gun laws - in particular a ban on assault weapons and closing the gun show loop hole - when the truth is that neither of these would have prevented the tragedy in the first place.  The gunman had simply borrowed the weapons from his mother who had legally acquired them, including passing all “background checks”.  Never mind that he killed her before setting out to the school on his mission.

But back to Delhi.  Hundreds of hours of coverage have focused on the poor victim and the need to bring justice to the brutal perpetrators of this horrible crime.  But aren’t these efforts a little too late?

By definition, criminal justice seeks to punish criminals after the fact and doesn’t help victims of existing crimes.  What are we doing to prevent such crimes?

The argument advanced by liberals is that stronger punishments tend to deter crime.  But there is no evidence that this works.  The Delhi criminals fully intended to kill the victim - and along the way, have their fun.  Indian criminal law has always been strict on convicted first degree murderers.  The criminals knew that they could potentially be subject to the death penalty, but this didn’t stop them at all.  They conveniently chose to ignore the threat of penalty and carried out their act anyway.

The point is that as a society we should focus efforts on trying to prevent such crimes and look to other societies for guidance.  So why does the Delhi incident not occur in the Middle East or the United States or Japan?  The answer lies in the checks and balances that society imposes on its people - most of which have vanished in India as a nation.

A modern society has three important checks on citizen behavior - moral, civic, and criminal justice.

Morality and culture:  A good society begins educating its citizens often beginning in the early childhood years.  Parents impart early moral education - the ability to distinguish right from wrong - largely in a religious context.  Growing up, we're told to help the poor and protect the infirm.  In the numerous mythological stories that Indian children are fed, men and women do fall in love.  But they unite only in marriage for Indian tradition has always preserved marriage as a holy union between man and woman sanctioned by God in the presence of a fire and never to be broken. In the 1970’s, unmarried girls in India would simply don a fake “Mangalsutra” and a wedding ring to ward off unwanted eve-teasers.  Because even eve-teasers knew that their target audience should never include married women, they generally stayed away from married women.

Civic sense:  Civic education starts early and focuses on respecting property rights and the privacy of others.  In the United States, people standing in line in a bank do so several feet away from the customer who is called in by the teller because they want to give the customer his private space as he discusses his financial needs with the banker.  Or go to a crowded train station in Tokyo.  The train arrives, the doors open and passengers exit first while people patiently wait to get in, standing, single-file, behind the yellow line.  Once these principles of civic behavior are taught, they sustain through time because everyone benefits and follows them for their own good.

The third leg of the stool is the criminal justice system. What can one say about a country, a third of whose so-called leaders are wanted for some violation of the law?  Or a nation which has the lowest proportion of police officers to the citizenry they help protect?  Or a country where the average citizen has such little respect for the arm of the law because he knows that just about everyone in the legal chain of command - from judges to a cop on the city beat - has a price?  Finally, when courts are so overburdened that civil cases (and some criminal cases as well) can drag on for 20+ years, what faith does the common citizen have?

Rapes occur less frequently when at least two of the three checks and balances work.  In the US and the west, a strong civic sense combined with a generally fair criminal justice system prevents Delhi- type incidents.  A society which prides itself on excessive niceties - you make an appointment with your neighbor before you go knocking on his door - does not unleash individuals who satiate their animal needs through force.  In America, criminals kill, yes, but they generally don’t rape. 

In the middle east, the two checks and balances which work are the moral and criminal justice dimensions.  The Koran glorifies the role of women.  Cultural rules specify that males should not even look at a woman unless they belong to the same family - and the traditional attire of women provides little chance for a violation to occur.  And just in case there is the odd violator planning a crime, constant surveillance by religious police - and strict and immediate sanctions - all but eliminate the chance.

Today, India has none of the three checks and balances working.  Our civic sense appears to have completely vanished.  The TV reporter clamoring for justice at the top of his voice would probably have nudged his two-wheeler over a sidewalk - meant for pedestrians - to make it to his studio in time.  When you are having a conversation with a store clerk ringing up your order, a person intrudes from behind and interrupts the conversation.  Was that an emergency?  No, the person simply wants his order to be filled.  If we feel that a government official asks for a legitimate document we can’t produce, we know that a few hundred rupees will do the trick.  If a break in the median on a divided highway is too far, we prefer to drive on it against traffic.  Our politicians take advantage of the time they are in office to maximize their own assets.  Indians, in general, have little respect for another individual in the public square - we are only concerned about advancing our own interests - and at all costs.

What about our morals?   Our strongest leg by far, carefully preserved, nurtured and built from the ground up over centuries, is under brutal assault.  Even liberals have commented extensively about Bollywood and TV serials glorifying progressive, western themes - premarital, extramarital and same-sex relationships - and how they are destroying the moral fabric of our society. 

Enter TV.  A little noticed truth is that even TV commercials have quietly joined in the act.  During the recent cricket telecasts there were four ads that need special mention. 
  1. In a Maruti Suzuki ad inspired by a popular Bollywood number - It’s the time to Disco - a young, presumably unmarried couple quickly gets up from reclined positions in a car on a lonely highway.  You can bet that this couple was not singing religious hymns when in the car.
    asdfe
  2. The famous and oft repeated Nokia campaign “Trendify” glorifies an act still deemed very private by most Indians - the kiss.  The images highlight premarital, extramarital and same-sex relationships all in a powerful 60 sec ad.
    adagag
  3. In a mobile phone ad, Virat Kohli, an eminent bachelor and an icon for the Indian masses, promotes a mobile phone as a way to get to girls.
    asdfasg
  4. And in what starts off as a harmless ad for Perk, the milk chocolate candy bar, a girl on a morning run with her dad tricks him to leave her alone so that she can signal to her boyfriend to some private time on a park bench - and who knows where else afterwards.
Our media promotes this unshackling as freedom and something that will place us on the path to an even more progressive society.  The New York Times recently published a story, "In India, Heated Debate over Teens and Sex."  Appalled, I commented on the piece later.

Back to the three legged stool of checks and balances.  India, always weak in educating its people in civic behavior while boasting of a notoriously inefficient criminal justice system had at least one solid leg to stand on:  the moral check imposed by society.  With morals deteriorating rapidly, the Indian stool appears to have no legs to stand on.

In the film Gandhi, Gandhi (Ben Kingsley) on hearing from Nehru (Roshan Seth) in his prison cell that his call for non-violence protests sparked riots that killed Britishers, laments that, "Perhaps we are not ready yet".  The question to ask now is, "Is our society ready to blindly embrace the culture of the west?"

The sad truth is that the average Indian has no central authority, authority figure or system to check his or her behavior.  Limits are stretched every day to serve his or her purpose without regard to other individuals or to the moral, civic or criminal justice considerations we had just a few decades ago. In Delhi, an unrepenting brutal gang decided to stretch this a little too far - with horrific consequences for a poor victim.

Unless we return to our storied moral fabric and strengthen at least one of our checks and balances, we may find that many more Delhis are likely to come our way.

[I wrote this piece soon after the Delhi horror.  And since then, not a day has passed without our seeing a rape story covered in the media.  The latest, of a Swiss woman, brutally gang raped in Madhya Pradesh is now on the 24 hour news channels constantly].

No comments:

Post a Comment

Thank you for your note. Please consider signing up for email or RSS updates on our home page www.relocationtoindia.com