Columnists
In India, the Answer to Boorish Behaviour is Not More Boorish Behaviour
T. SHER SINGH
News - New Delhi, India, Jan 1, 2013:
A group of Delhites used explosives in an attempt to blow up the home belonging to the family of one of the six accused in the December 16 New Delhi gang-rape.
News - New Delhi, India, Jan 3, 2013
The Bar Association in the jurisdiction where the six accused are to be tried, has refused to allow its members to provide any legal representation to them, and has advocated that they not be given any defence counsel because, they say, it’s an “open-and-shut” case against them.
How do you change India which seems to have remained mostly unchanged in its attitudes and behaviour since its lands were overrun by jungles and animals?
Our Elders have come and gone, having left behind small regions such as Punjab changed and emancipated, but now the rest of the subcontinent resents their modernity and wants to snuff out all progress, and anyone who dares push it.
With but a very small percentage of the billion who swarm the land capable of feeling the prick of conscience, the masses somehow do have an inkling that they behave badly; the recent protests over the brutal rape and subsequent death of the victim in New Delhi attest to that.
But they have no idea what to do next, beyond jumping up and down like yahoos to create public spectacles and grab a few seconds in the media spotlight. All they know is how to, themselves, behave like brutish beasts.
The country calls itself a democracy and thinks that is all that is needed -- a label! -- to be a democracy. No need to abide by its principles, to respect rights and freedoms; only to further your own prurient urges.
Hence, the attempt to blow up the family home of one of the accused.
Remember, this is a democracy?
And being a democracy requires due process. A fair, public trial, for example.
Why?
Simple. The rights you accord the ‘least’ of your citizens -- be they poor, or be they accused of despicable crimes -- are the very same rights you yourself will enjoy when it is your turn.
Which requires time, patience, resources, and procedural fairness, all of it under the full glare of public scrutiny, no matter how heinous the crime, no matter how “open-and-shut” the case against them may appear, no matter how loud the clamour for vengeance.
There is no room for unseemly haste, or kangaroo courts, or lynching.
All of it, in a democracy, comes under the rubric of a “fair trial“.
And the central pillar of a “fair trial” is proper legal representation.
Any lawyer, leave alone a Bar Association, who even suggests that any accused does not have the right to counsel of his choice, or himself/herself refuses to provide it, not only fails to understand his/her raison d’etre as a lawyer or attorney or advocate, but must be automatically stripped of the license to practice law.
Legal representation is not a privilege, it is a right. And it is not reserved for the rich or the pious or the learned or the powerful. No crime, no matter how severe or heinous, permits the suspension or dilution of this right.
I remember the heinous crimes of Indira Gandhi. Not long after the outrages she had committed in June 1984, but well before she was unfortunately summarily executed by her own bodyguards, a trio of India’s security elite trained to the nth degree to defend India’s honour and Constitution, I remember being put on the spot by a journalist, a microphone inches from my face, with a loaded question.
I was but a few months away from being sworn a barrister and solicitor in Toronto.
The question was: Being a lawyer, would I be willing to defend Indira Gandhi in court if somehow she was brought to trial for her crimes?
I recall it didn’t take me even a few seconds to tap into all that I had learnt in the five preceding years of legal training to reply: “I would have no difficulty in putting aside all that I feel about the woman to defend her with all of my ability, if called upon to do so. It‘s her right. It‘s my job.”
It didn’t require any great wisdom or mental gymnastics for me to arrive at that conclusion. It is what being a lawyer in a democracy and a free society requires.
And it is the difference between a society which is civilized and one that isn’t.
I’m afraid a country whose very upholders of the law are ready, willing and able to betray society at the drop of a hat, has no future.
Add to that the motley crew of lawmakers (politicians and legislators), and another bunch, the protectors of law (judges and police), none of whom either understand or live up to their mandates, and you end up with a society which is not capable of changing itself.
The changes required in India are not to the landscape or its laws. Nor will the public lynching of a handful of criminals help, if 99.9 % of them roam scot free.
The change India needs is in the minds of its people, from the bottom up, from the top down. A sea change ...
So far, it appears, India has only one future: Chaos. Anarchy. Mayhem.
January 3, 2012
Conversation about this article
1: Parmjit Singh (Canada), January 03, 2013, 11:44 AM.
Stunning! If that is true of the Bar Association, they are actually trivializing vicious murder. Did they get their education at mob school or law school?
2: Aryeh Leib (Israel), January 03, 2013, 2:38 PM.
If this is indeed so, it would appear that the only solution for Sikhs is to get their brothers and sisters out of there - with all deliberate speed. Sikhi has no chance of survival in such a poisoned atmosphere.
3: Rosalia (Baltimore, Maryland, USA), January 03, 2013, 4:53 PM.
I was thinking the opposite -- that maybe it is time for a charismatic Sikh to rise up and lead in a country that seems to lack leaders with a moral compass or integrity or a sense of justice.
4: G C Singh (USA), January 03, 2013, 8:03 PM.
India signed its death warrant the day Indira Gandhi, with the full support of all Hindu parties and its propaganda media, attacked Harmandar Sahib and killed thousands of innocent Sikhs round the country. The inferno of violence, death, rape, loot and plunder unleashed by her son Rajiv Gandhi in November 1984, finally sealed the fate of India. The chickens are coming home to roost and now there is a loud chorus of breast beating and hand wringing. But the entire Hindu establishment is still totally shameless and there is absolutely no remorse for the horrors committed against the Sikh nation and and not even a remote inclination or sincerity to tell the truth and do justice. This I hope finally unites all Sikhs under the Nishaan Sahib with a pledge to do every thing to achieve political, economic and military power in our own hands as a major force on the Indian subcontinent. This is the only way to survive and live with dignity and honor.
5: N Singh (Canada), January 04, 2013, 1:19 AM.
Punjab is our land and we will never leave it. We have NEVER turned our backs and run ...
6: Lora (Canada), January 04, 2013, 11:00 AM.
All Sikhs even felt Indira Gandhi had the right to come to Harmandar Sahib to pay her respects (no matter how fakE) after she ordered the Indian army to attack it and 38 other gurdwaras and got thousands murdered and worse (raped, tortured). I remember when Joseph Fritzl shocked the world. His crime was unusual and extreme, yet Austria had no problem making sure he had a lawyer. Indeed, I worked for a lawyer who was defending a rapist who went into someone's home and raped two little girls with a knife and damaged them badly. I even talked to the guy one time when he phoned. Everyone deserves the right to a fair trial no matter what they have done. I was really surprised to hear nobody will represent these alleged rapists. I was also surprised by the fact that a guy charged a rapper named Honey Singh for vulgar lyrics and the police just went along with it. I was also surprised by reading that the petition against Honey Singh went viral. I wondered why he alone of all people who sing such songs in India was chosen. Might it be because he is British by nationality, of Punjabi origins? If it comes to banning vulgar content that denigrates women, India has a lot to ban including passages from Hindu scriptures. The Kamasutra, a divine text on the "science" of sex (a Brahmin duty to delve in, apparently), even advocates drugging and raping a woman to shame her into marrying one and advocates brutal sexual violence on non-Aryan women. Honey Singh was accused of infecting people's minds for seven years in a way that could lead them to rape women in one newspaper article. I really wonder what they would do with the guy who wrote the 50 Shades of Grey books for if Honey Singh's lyrics have a causal connection to brutal rapes then these books do as well, yet the west does not ban them but continues to sell them in huge numbers, I am sure. Indeed, India should also ban its so-called 'father', dear Mohandas Gandhi. He said a girl who had been raped had lost her value as a human being and it was okay for her family to kill her to perserve her honour. It's no secret that he himself was seriously perverted when it came to matters of sex.
7: H S Vachoa (USA), January 04, 2013, 11:46 AM.
There is also the news story of the teenager in Punjab who was raped recently. The girl was harassed by the criminals within the Punjab Police and pressured to marry one of the rapists.
8: H.Kaur (Canada), January 05, 2013, 12:29 AM.
The poor girl could even have been raped by the police in Punjab as girls in other states have been by the police when they went to report their rapes. I am sure there are a lot of rapists in the Punjab police, considering the government used to rape, torture, and murder so many men, women, and children for over a decade with impunity. That she was told to marry one of the rapists is so disgusting. It just shows how the ancient Brahmin mindset still rules the people of India. That the girl and her family didn't agree to this proposal was good, at least. I was also shocked by this other case in Punjab. A young woman was with her boyfriend in a car and the police harassed them, asking the girl why she with a boy and threatened to tell her parents, etc. Then they got people with them with cameras to take the girl's image. She jumped in front of a train rather than put her family to shame. I didn't know the police there did this sort of thing though I knew the Hindu extemist group, Shiv Shena, did on Valentine's day and stuff (I watched a clip of them recording young kids they thought were celebrating Valentine's day in Patiala). It is disgusting when people start being the moral police.