Author: Editorial
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: November 30, 2005
URL: http://www.indianexpress.com/archive_full_story.php?content_id=82926
Introduction: The proposed communal harmony
law sacrifices common sense to political correctness
No one can accuse the UPA government of forgetting
its National Common Minimum Programme pieties. The Cabinet has just cleared
a bill for the prevention of communal violence. The big question is, will
the proposed law bell the communal cat, when numerous other pieces of legislation
to address such a situation have not? From all evidence, that prospect remains
remote. We may then just end up with one more legislative good intention in
our statute books and have precious little protection on the ground. In addressing
issues as vital as this, political correctness must always be subjected to
the test of old-fashioned common sense.
A bill that doesn't define communal violence
and doesn't envisage how a particular area is to be deemed as "communally
sensitive" clearly enough, is destined to be a dud. An earlier draft
of the bill had empowered the Centre to unilaterally declare an area as "communally
disturbed". The present bill- evidently in deference to the federal character
of the republic- disperses this responsibility, and ends up appearing, well,
plain fuzzy, and fuzziness, we know, is not an asset when communal fires are
raging. There is a fallacy at the heart of this legislation, and that is the
presumption that while citizens may be driven by communal agendas and given
to communal acts, the state itself cannot be accused of such biases. But the
evidence of half a century of riots in India belies such a claim. Whether
it was Delhi, 1984, or Gujarat, 2001, the criminal and motivated lack of action
by the state and its institutions of law and order was in large part responsible
for the riots claiming thousands of lives.
Given this reality, it certainly makes more
sense to think of reforming the institutions of law and order rather than
pushing through Parliament half-baked laws just for the sake of being seen
to have done the "right thing". We would advise the UPA government
then to concentrate on the promise it has just made in Parliament to come
up with a new police act to replace the Victorian one that continues to hold
sway. This is not to argue that communal violence is just a matter of law
and order. It is not. But equally, an independent police force, along with
an independent district administration, has been known to turn a communally
fraught situation around in a matter of hours - and long before a communal
harmony law was a twinkle in the eye of the UPA government.
