Lawbreaking appears to be a national habit in our country. Every country has its set of law breakers but here it goes on callously as routine. Violations of law has the backing of those who flirt with power. As treating laws with disdain is mostly the prerogative of the rich and the powerful, law enforcement agencies are gradually paralysed or, at best, selectively activated. The powerless often become victims of enforced law. This discrepancy makes our law enforcement highly discriminatory. It manifests right from petty fining of a traffic offence to investigation into major offences.
Our indifferent attitude towards laws and rules was on display in our response to the recent amendments to the Motor Vehicles Act that sought to bring in greater discipline on the roads by enhanced fines and punishments. It is presumed that when Parliament considered the bill, the concerns of the citizens were sufficiently articulated before approving it. But once Parliament approves a bill, the woolly approach to its implementation does not augur well for a democratic polity. Does it mean that Parliament does not adequately reflect peoples’ sentiments? Such a disconnect between the citizens and the political class is a matter of great concern.
The demolition of four high-rise apartments at the Maradu Municipality in Kochi as ordered and stridently followed up by the Supreme Court is in the news with a wide spectrum of approaches to the issue being expressed. Demolition does have financial, ecological and human costs. But the blatant violation of the Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) guidelines cannot be whitewashed by the narratives of human misery. Of course, that misery is not imaginary; it is real. Who is going to compensate the owners who paid a lifetime’s savings to own a flat? While such questions are quite relevant and painful and need to be answered, it should not be used as a blinder towards the calculated subversion of laws.
It has been pointed out that targeting these four flats is discriminatory as there are several such violations all over the country. But that argument cannot be stretched to its illogical limit of sparing a few violators as all violators have not been booked. It does not negate or minimise the extent of violation.
This trait of selective obedience to laws has made us callous. (Symptomatically, a few years ago there was a massive rally in Kerala by two-wheeler riders against wearing helmets!) When laws are ignored with some manufactured justification, there are always some to applaud it. In a developed society even a minor violation is frowned upon, but here we often consider it heroic, especially if the offender is not caught.
Almost all our national ills can be traced to this national habit of being casual with laws at all levels. When a VIP breaks the speed limit or jumps a red-light and goes scot-free with a few police vehicles accompanying, the onlooker learns the lesson that if you are powerful enough, you can break laws with impunity. When billionaires dupe banks by a few hundred crores and merrily flee the country to live opulent lives abroad, but the banks are eager to attach the house of a defaulter farmer for a few thousand rupees, a citizen loses faith in the fairness of the enforcing system. He tries to exercise power through locally powerful people who help him bypass the rules. Thus, corruption gets entrenched in the system. Corruption is possible only in an ecosystem of elastic law-enforcing machinery.
While violation of any law has its social and ethical consequences, subversion of environmental laws has generational consequences. The present generation with its consumerist compulsions considers only the immediate gains, merrily refusing to weigh the deleterious consequences on the coming generations. Intergenerational justice has become unreasonably altruistic for a generation addicted to pathological consumerism. When the whole development discourse is centred on producing more, consuming more and wasting more, environmental laws are bound to become a thorn in the flesh. Therefore, there is a conspiracy among all the key players to soft pedal them. That gives impunity to the greedy ‘developers’ whose prime objective is to maximise profits.
This conspiracy of silence is the breeding ground of rampant corruption, accelerating irreversible consequences like the climate change, deluges, untimely rains, landslides, droughts, melting of glaciers etc. That is why the younger generation needs to take up the cause of the environment and commit to non negotiable adherence to all laws and particularly laws on environment. When the teenager Greta Thunberg lamented at the UN that “you have stolen our dreams”, it touched the conscience of the world.
The young speaker echoed the suppressed sentiments of a large number of people when she said rather candidly that “for way too long, the politicians and the people in power have gotten away with not doing anything to fight the climate crisis, but we will make sure that they will not get away with it any longer”. She said rightly that “we need to be angry” and then “transform that anger into action”.
It is a pity that we are not even concerned, much less angry when laws are violated everywhere and enforcement is selective and sporadic. In the development graph of a country there comes a golden period when obeying the laws becomes a non-negotiable obligation. Till that moment arrives, our claims to greatness and glory are nothing more than kite flying.
K Jayakumar
Former Chief Secretary, Government of Kerala and former Vice-Chancellor, Thunchath Ezhuthachan Malayalam University
Email: k.jayakumar123@gmail.com