The world’s most significant democracies are competing in a game that looks absurd but reflects sound political expediency. The signals are fascinating. Republican Joseph Kent has resigned from the leadership of the US National Counterterrorism Center on the moral ground that Iran presented “no imminent threat” to America. Meanwhile, the US is all at sea in its Iran project because it underestimated the importance of the Strait of Hormuz, so it has permitted its gaze to wander to the Caribbean and alight on Cuba.
Meanwhile in India, Himalayan climate activist Sonam Wangchuk was released almost six months after his arrest, days before a crucial court hearing that could have determined the legality of preventive custody under draconian laws designed to combat terrorism but used routinely against activists, academics and other well-intentioned troublemakers.
There’s been a steady stream of bailouts after years-long incarcerations in the Delhi riots and Bheema Koregaon cases. Long ago, the trail was blazed by Binayak Sen (now critically ill), who was arrested for sedition on the charge of bearing communications between Naxalites in 2007 and jailed repeatedly. The facts of these cases did not change between arrest and release. If the basis of the release was valid, then the basis of the arrest must be in question.
Every political case that has collapsed in court for want of evidence is questionable. Each served an obvious political purpose—by the time the detenus were released, the world had changed. The weaponisation of the law is a process. Its product is impunity.
Legal about-faces are attributed to the professional incompetence of the security agencies (in India) or the mental incompetence of the political leadership (in the US). But could they possibly be signs of canny competence instead? The whimsical pivot to Cuba and the steady release of Indian political prisoners both display arbitrariness. Arbitrariness powerfully demonstrates absolute authority, establishes that it is above the law, punishing and absolving at will without providing reason for changing its mind on a whim.
While mere mortals support the rule of law, maximum leaders reaffirm their authority by constant displays of arbitrary violence. Nothing new here. The difference is palpable in the 14th century Rihla of Ibn Battuta of Tangier, the restless and learned traveller who was simultaneously bribed and frightened into being the qazi of Delhi by Muhammad bin Tughlaq, the favourite mad sultan of history. Or was he extraordinarily intelligent?
The qazi followed the law and punished his servant in Delhi for a transgression. The servant, no less intelligent, noted that he had received more lashes than he deserved under Sharia law and gave the difference back to his master who, bound by the law, did not complain—except in his travelogue.
The emperor was made of sterner stuff. He routinely conducted flamboyant executions and beatings in public in the fort of Tughlaqabad. Popular history denounces Tughlaq’s ferocity as imperial madness, but its coercive power is abundantly clear in Ibn Battuta’s account. He yearned to escape Delhi, but did not have the courage to bail out—not even when he was put on the sultan’s hit list for associating with a sufi who was out of favour. This was a case of crime by association—exactly what Binayak Sen was accused of six centuries later.
The arbitrariness of rulers has secondary effects—apart from the fog of war, we now have the fog of peace. In a confused landscape, simultaneous suspension of belief and disbelief produces suspended animation—a paralysis of will, an inability to differentiate between truth and falsehood, right and wrong, facts and opinions. Decisions are permanently deferred and action is eternally tentative.
The dwindling of 20th-century institutions is thickening the fog—multilateral organisations in a rules-based global order, which was in turn based on the primacy of universal rights. The long slide of the United Nations, which began about 25 years ago, is finally complete—it has no influence over conflicts international or domestic. The mechanisms of the World Trade Organization, which had made arbitrary initiatives like tariff wars redundant, no longer work.
The US is presently considering taking umbrage about the manufacturing capacity of India, which is completely arbitrary, since no nation should have a say on the industries of another. The two pillars on which the modern world stood— international relations and trade—are now at the mercy of whim and whimsy. What remains intact, then?
Freedom of speech and fair elections? For decades, they served as the gold standards of civilisation. Using them, we can distinguish between North Korea and South Korea, Russia and America, Pakistan and India. But the sanctity of elections is now in doubt even in formerly bulletproof democracies like India and the US.
The media has lost its formalisms and firewalls, and fact, fiction, opinion, dream, nightmare, philosophy, conspiracy theory, pornography pandering to diverse senses flood us through the singular viewport of the smartphone screen. In this disorienting space without boundaries and moorings, is it surprising that arbitrariness flourishes, and produces impunity in the corridors of power, and a sense of impotence among common people?
Pratik Kanjilal | SPEAKEASY | Senior Fellow, Henry J Leir Institute of Migration and Human Security, Fletcher School, Tufts University
(Views are personal)
(Tweets @pratik_k)