What Is Happening In Lalgarh?

Our newspapers are not performing their job as far as the Lalgarh Rebellion is concerned: there is total silence today.

From what we know, the central government’s para-military force, the CRPF, has overcome resistance and taken over this part of West Midnapore district, just 200 kms from Calcutta. Yet, the CRPF is no solution. A military takeover is not “civil government.”

And there is worse on the CRPF: They have now been removed from Baramullah in Kashmir. This follows the hideous incident at Shopian where CRPF personnel were suspected of rape and murder. In Baramullah too, public anger against the CRPF was sparked off by their excesses.

If we leave the CRPF and its excesses aside, and look at the local police, here is a report of an “encounter” in Andhra Pradesh, a hub of Naxal activity, in which a top Naxal leader was killed yesterday. And here is another report that claims in its title that Naxals in AP have been "tamed" - though the concluding paras indicate quite the opposite to be true.

Yet, this is also not the “rule of law.” We can usefully contrast the methods of our desi police with the Brits – and this is of a period before there was any policing in India; the Indian Police Act is dated 1861, shortly after the Mutiny. The example that follows is of the 1830s.

In those days, traveling in north India was horribly unsafe because of gangs of Thugs, who would strangle their victims and loot their possessions. Over 20,000 travellers perished every year because of Thugs.

The records speak as follows:

“There were in the years 1831 to 1837 more than three thousand Thugs convicted… More than 400 were hanged, more than a thousand transported for life… Another thousand were awaiting trial in 1837…. But the work was done; that evil was finished.”

Why did the Brits act in this “legal way”? As the same author says, this was “because they stood for the rule of law as against the individual whim that ruled before.” In Mughal India, as Sir Thomas Roe, Ambassador to the Court of Jahangir, recorded in his journals:

“There is no law in India; the Emperor by his own word ruleth.”

The underlings of the Grand Mughal in Delhi had their own way of administering justice when highway robberies occurred: A robust young man from a nearby village would be hauled up and summarily executed on the spot where the robbery occurred. There are reports of executions ordered without even hearing the accused. Yet, this is precisely what has just happened in Andhra Pradesh. It is this that happened to Veerappan. It is this that must be happening in Lalgarh today.

My point is this: There is “rule of law” only when those entrusted with enforcing this law are under the law themselves. This is the ideal of “constitutional government.” This is also the ideal of “civil government.”

What is happening in India today is that the forces of the Central State are doing exactly what the Mughal Emperor’s underlings did in their time.

Yes, the press must re-focus all attention on the Lalgarh Rebellion. Singur and Nandigram were great upheavals in Indian politics. Lalgarh must become one too. We must engage in civil politics with the rebels. We must speak with the ordinary tribals. Mere force, that too from Laputa-on-High, is no solution at all.