The rights of the wrongs

Most of the wrongs of the world are done in the name of right. Be it Islamic terrorism (jihad - fight against the enemies of Islam)  or partition of India when around 2 million people died and 14 million were displaced or dropping atomic bombs on Japan or butchering of Jews by Nazis. Sometimes I feel the idea of right is the wrongest thing ever invented by humanity. Let’s deconstruct the idea of right and wrong and see how far we can go. 

The first thing to acknowledge is the fact that there are many kinds of wrongs. We can start with something we call stupid. What is stupid? Stupid is something logically or rationally wrong. For example, I saw one WhatsApp forward saying Saheen Bagh protesters are being paid Rs 500 per day for protesting. Logically the government can pay them Rs 501 to stay at home. The real number will be actually even lesser than Rs 500 as they can earn something more by working instead of protesting. Plain stupidity is logically wrong. But stupidity is not punishable. Idea is that stupid person harms himself more through his stupidity than others.

The second level of wrong happens at ethical level. Let’s consider ethics at the level of a well knit group. Ethics of cartel involves keeping the prices high so that everyone in the group wins instead of competing and lowering margins for everyone. Other example is omertà - the ethics of keeping quiet when interrogated by police, popular with Italian mafia. Lots of wrong in the world is not possible without excellent work ethics of the community. When talking about ethically wrong we need to question whose ethics and for what purpose. The right judge of ethical wrongs is the community that created that ethic in the first place. The ethic could be morally wrong, but we will come to that a little later. Ethically wrong again may not be punishable. The punishment if any happens in the form of boycott from community itself. 

The third kind of wrong is perhaps legally wrong. Legal is a very nationalistic concept. When countries go to war and kill people, they are doing nothing legally wrong. Legal is the contract between the individual or citizen and the state. Legal is defined by legal code or some set of rules like constitution and laws derived from it. The purpose of judiciary and police is to prevent legal wrongs. Legal is a funny fiction in its own right but the alternative (whim of someone) is even worse. Consider IPC 429: “Whoever commits mischief by killing, poisoning, maiming or rendering useless, any elephant, camel, horse, mule, buffalo, bull, cow or ox, whatever may be the value thereof, of any other animal of the value of fifty rupees or upwards, shall be punished with imprisonment or either description for a term which may extend to five years, or with fine, or with both.” By the Rs 50 standard anyone eating fish or chicken should go to jail for five years. This makes almost all the meat eating people of India criminals. What does rendering useless means? If we kill and eat a chicken was it useless or useful? Does the Rs 50 limit applies to just one animal as individual or total worth of all animals combined more than Rs 50? If someone is willing to buy Rs 250 spray can for mosquitoes or cockroaches, then they do have value more than Rs 50. What about hit and run of animals on the roads, especially dogs and cats? They also render the animals useless (read dead). 

What Bhagat Singh did was legally wrong but morally correct. And he was legally punished. Legally wrong depends on the kind of government. Dictatorial governments make many more things illegal than democratic governments. Legal wrongs make a man criminal and punishable, but not really morally wrong, not at least all the time. As we saw in the case of IPC 429, legally wrong can be stupid as well. More examples: traffic fines are for not for pollution but for not having pollution certificate. Most people are actually fined for forgetting and not polluting. Another example is using phone while driving. The whole app based taxi industry works by using phone while driving. Almost every taxi driver is breaking this law about 10 times a day. Not sure how many arrests happen. Either the law should be abolished or the industry. The point really is that there is nothing sacred about being legally right. It is punishable doesn’t really means it is just. The good part is that in a democratic country, legal is updatable. If governments want they can bring legal closer to just. 

Legal has another dark side as well. Blaming legally wrong is easy, but proving it another ball game. India has 3.3 crore cases pending with various courts. Many of the cases literally take lifetime and sometime even more. Courts have now reduced their working speed to that of gods, giving justice only in next birth. Whats the point of having courts if they can’t work faster than god?  The super slow justice system is a boon for real criminals. They know that even if they get caught the punishment will come far late in life and perhaps after death. On the other hand, it is super dangerous for people who are innocent, because they will spend lifetime in proving their innocence. Essentially with a justice system like ours, we can screw peoples life by false accusation. Justice delayed in not justice denied, justice delayed is actually injustice in the name of justice. Such a system makes false reports almost the highest kind of criminal activity. This gives police much greater power than they appear to have on paper. The justice may prevail after life, but injustice can be done here and now and will last a lifetime. 

Another famous kind of wrong is historical wrong. Both caste system and reservation based on caste system come under this category. So does the Ram Mandir issue or article 370. Dead people can’t be legally punished in a system in which the highest form of punishment is death. We need constructs bigger than human to bring about historical justice. We need constructs which stay consistent over generations.  Legal systems have no way of dealing with historical wrongs in a democracy. Legally only two things exist: humans and corporations. Religion, caste, money, land, property, etc all are attributes of humans. They exists through humans. No humans no religion. No humans no caste. No humans no money. No humans no ownership of land or property.  To say the least, historical wrongs are not legal wrongs and hence not punishable or fixable. They probably come in the category of logically wrong. Any fix to historical wrong is yet another historical wrong which will come to haunt the generations yet to come. The only way out of historical wrongs is to pardon and end the cycle. Most humans are just cogs in these systems with very few beneficiaries. These systems are sustained through humans. Eliminating humans don’t kill the system, they are simply replaced. Killing or punishing goons doesn’t eliminate goondagiri. New ones come to replace the old. Killing poor doesn’t eliminate poverty, the system creates new poor. Eating chicken doesn’t eliminate chicken, systems create more chicken. Historical crimes are crimes of systems. Sadly legal does’t see systems. Most systems derive their power from poverty and story of injustice. What they cause is again more injustice and poverty. It is just a game of ping-pong played over generations for the amusement of few and horrors for everyone else. In a fight between individual and system, system always wins. We can find systems only from statistics and the deviations from normal. Language is an inadequate tool for proving or disproving systems. The right choice is not to try hard to win, but to stop playing the game. 

The last kind of wrong I will discuss is what is morally wrong. Again morals are not universal. Different cultures have different sense of morality. Not all moral wrongs are legally wrong and some moral wrongs can be legally right and vice-a-versa. Morality in India is a tricky subject. In my limited experience Indian morality is roughly on the lines of might is right. This makes establishing “might” the most important part of the existence as “right” will follow anyway from the “might”. This creates unique problems for India. The legal right and wrong is applicable to individual but the individual has almost no moral power as he doesn’t heads the moral food chain. The individual doesn’t have the power to decide what is wrong and right, because our morality is always looking for, or at the “might” to decide what is right. Morality is not a choice or a decision, it is inevitable and pre-decided. This sad sense of spineless morality is disturbing. This morality is designed for status quo. The might continues to define what is right and by definition remains the might. I wonder when it started. Was it the religion which took away the rights of people to think? Or was it the division of labour and division of thinking. Or was it the slavery under the Sultanate and then the Mughals and then the Britishers. Did slavery came first or the morality of slavery? Whatever be the answer, this concoction of wrongs is dangerous.

Wrongs are wrong for different reasons. But are we the right judges of wrong? How do we protect wrongs from our stupidity, our legality, our biases and our morality? May be drink a glass of water and talk to someone. May be the largest step we need to take is to go from “might is right” to “you might be right”. 

Representation of truth and justice

Truth and justice are represented through words. No one fights for things that don't have a name. No one can bring to discussion that which doesn't have a name yet. The idea of truth and justice is mostly limited by the seekers vocabulary. 

Not all things worth representing have words for them and not all words represents something worth representing. 

Alternative tale of Black and White snakes

One upon a time there lived two snake brothers in a jungle. One of them was white in colour and other was black. Their parents named them Blacky and Whitey. One day they were playing who will pick the apple from a tree. The apple was a little high and they were finding it hard to reach. In a fit to win, both of them took a big run-up for jumping and struck the apple at the same time. The apple fell, but both of them started fighting over who win. Blacky said he won and Whitey said he won. The fight over apple made them bitter enemies. 

One day a white snake was quarrelling with a black snake. Whitey gave the black snake a good thrashing and told the white snake to stay away from black snakes as they are really evil. When Blacky came to know about this, he thrashed a white snake as well and repeated the same message of evil about the white snakes. That day the jungle got divided between black and white snakes. It was impossible for snakes to move about freely in the jungle. Whenever some group of black snakes saw some alone white snake, they would immediately surround and beat him. White snakes did the same to black snakes. 

Once a snake catcher came to the jungle. He observed how the black and white snakes behaved. He immediately came up with a strategy to catch snakes. First he used his tricks to catch a white snake. Then he took a big cage and put the white snake in it. He kept this cage in the area that belonged to black snakes. When the black snakes saw a white snake, they all flocked into the cage to attack the white snake. While they were busy beating the white snake, the snake catcher closed the cage and took home a big bundle of black snakes. He sold the snakes in the market to people who liked to eat snakes. He sold all the snakes except one black snake. Next time he put the black snake in the cage and took it to white snakes area. As expected, the white snakes came to attack the black snakes and ended up getting caught in the cage. 

This continued for many generations of snakes and snake catchers. Slowly the number of snakes captured by snakes catcher started to decrease. He wasn’t really sure why so many snakes are not attacking. After some time he decided to stop catching snakes as it was not worth the effort. When the snake catcher told this story to his son, he was very much intrigued. He was a biologist and interested in animal behaviour. He took the cage to the forest and caught few snakes and started to compare the snakes who attacked and those who didn’t. It took him long series of experiments to find that the snakes who were not attacking were colour blind. These snakes  always saw things in the shades of grey, never quite sure which one is black and which one is white. Some of these snakes were white and some were black. Since these snakes couldn’t distinguish between white and black, they survived. The jungle was grey again with black and white snakes everywhere. 

Tale of Blacky and Whitey

One upon a time there lived two snake brothers in a jungle. One of them was white in colour and other was black. Their parents named them Blacky and Whitey. One day they were playing who will pick the apple from a tree. The apple was a little high and they were finding it hard to reach. In a fit to win, both of them took a big run-up for jumping and struck the apple at the same time. The apple fell, but both of them started fighting over who win. Blacky said he won and Whitey said he won. The fight over apple made them bitter enemies. 

One day a white snake was quarrelling with a black snake. Whitey gave the black snake a good thrashing and told the white snake to stay away from black snakes as they are really evil. When Blacky came to know about this, he thrashed a white snake as well and repeated the same message of evil about the white snakes. That day the jungle got divided between black and white snakes. It was impossible for snakes to move about freely in the jungle. Whenever some group of black snakes saw some alone white snake, they would immediately surround and beat him. White snakes did the same to black snakes. 

Once a snake catcher came to the jungle. He observed how the black and white snakes behaved. He immediately came up with a strategy to catch snakes. First he used his tricks to catch a white snake. Then he took a big cage and put the white snake in it. He kept this cage in the area that belonged to black snakes. When the black snakes saw a white snake, they all flocked into the cage to attack the white snake. While they were busy beating the white snake, the snake catcher closed the cage and took home a big bundle of black snakes. He sold the snakes in the market to people who liked to eat snakes. He sold all the snakes except one black snake. Next time he put the black snake in the cage and took it to white snakes area. As expected, the white snakes came to attack the black snakes and ended up getting caught in the cage. 

The snakes didn’t knew what was happening. Whenever the snakes disappeared, the snakes thought it was the other side who was killing them. One day Whitey was roaming around in the jungle and he saw lots of white snakes beating a black snake. He was very tired and thinking about missing snakes. Instead of joining them, he just stood where he was and started resting, waiting for other white snakes to come back. He was startled when he saw the snake catcher closing the cage and catching all the snakes. He was devastated. It was clear to him why the snakes are disappearing. He called all the white snakes and told them about cage and how the snake catcher is using black snakes to catch them. The white snakes were furious. They decided to kill Whitey because he was the one who told them to beat the black snakes whenever they see one. 

The next time snake catcher came with a cage with a black snake, no white snake went near the cage. Snake catcher was surprised. He knew that they knew how he was catching them. Even when any black snake came into white area, they would not bother and let him be. The two areas of the jungle started to change colours. The black area became smaller and the white area started to grow and become grey in colour.  Few white snakes were still getting caught in the grey area, but the black snakes continue to disappear. After some time very few black snakes were left in the black area. The snake catcher stopped coming to the jungle because most of the snakes had learned how to avoid the cage. The jungle was grey again with black and white snakes everywhere. 

The leftist income tax

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs" is a slogan popularised by Karl Marx in his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Program. Who is supposed to implement this in a socialist society? Naturally this has to be government, otherwise who is to establish ability and who will establish need. If people have to go to court for everything, such a society will spend most of the time in court. It demands special people with impartial ability to judge ability and need, almost a magical quality. Such people don’t exist by the way. 

What kind of slogan suits a capitalistic society? If I have to invent it, it would be “to everyone at the same price”. And who sets the price? That of course is market, demand and supply. Capitalistic society has no need of any government, except the need to ensure security of markets and to ensure that markets are fair. The capitalistic society fails to comprehend public goods.  Without pricing, it can’t understand the value or relative value. The irony is that what capitalism produces is essentially a pubic good, a fair market. Everywhere markets emerge, it creates equality of access through pricing. We can think of pricing as the impartial ability to judge ability and need and that exactly is what socialism requires.  Capitalism in essence is the best implementation of socialism, the one that actually works, fairly. 

What are brands and what is insurance, both products of capitalism? Isn’t branding trying to get from each according to his ability to pay and insurance trying to give each according to his needs? Socialism is a vision of society better implemented through capitalism. A powerful capitalistic government is then a contradiction in terms. Capitalism doesn’t wants anything from government, it is just a necessary evil to ensure security. 

The question that bothers me in the capitalistic society is that of income tax. Income tax comes straight from the socialism text book - “from each according to his ability”. Why do we have income tax brackets and why is it based on a percentage? An equal society should share the cost of running the nation equally. If government is a public good, why should some people pay more? The right tax in the capitalistic society may be called Nation Building Fund. Whatever money is needed by the government beyond its sources of income should be divided equally between all the people of the country. During the financial year 2017-2018 the personal income tax  collected was 4,19,884 Crore.  Number of people who filed income tax in the same period was 6,32,50,002. India has a population of about 1.3 billion with roughly 40% children below 18 years. Number of people in the country that enjoy the benefits of living in a country are around 780 million. The number of people who pay income tax in India is around 5%. On average every tax payer paid around Rs 66 thousand. If all the capable people of India (not children) had to contribute the same amount, per person contribution would come to Rs 5383. It will actually reduce the income tax paid by people in the smallest slab from 10% @ 2.5 lakhs i.e 25 thousand by 80%. Thus every tax payer on average is carrying the burden of 11.3 non tax paying Indians.

Rs 5383 per year Uniform Nation Building Fund sounds very good except when we look at the definition of poverty in India. India has some 20% of the population below poverty line which is roughly around annual income of Rs 10,000.  Rs 5383 is more than 50% of the annual income of everyone who is under poverty line. 

I understand that many people cannot afford to pay a Uniform Nation Building Fund contribution . That is fine. What I don’t understand is that 95% of the Indian population which enjoys leftist  benefit, however meager they are and still use the word leftist as a slur? I hear the references to swabhimaan allover the social media, but doesn’t swabhimaan applies to paying for what you receive from the country? Indians have been protesting and vandalising public property for as long as we have become a country, but suddenly people are asking for recovering damages for destruction caused to public property. That is good start and I love it. We should have started earlier. Irony is that statistically only 5% of the people deserve to be asking for it. Rest 95% had no contribution to building that public property in the first place. Why so much gap between the words and reality? 

I love the management principle that one can only manage what one can measure. It is time we start the Uniform Nation Building Fund and Nation Building Loan Fund. Our income tax contribution should be split between these two funds. Rs 5383 goes to Uniform Nation Building Fund and any excess goes to Nation Building Loan Fund which gives nominal interest on that excess paid tax. If we pay less than Rs 5383, then the balance comes from Nation Building Loan Fund as a loan at the same nominal interest. If we don't pay any income tax, then all of it comes from the Nation Building Loan Fund. Let’s just calculate this for few years (actually, we can do this calculation with the given tax data) and see how are people doing.  May be government can make name tags with percentile scores (0-100) or some platinum, gold, silver, bronze stuff and call them swabhimaan tags. That will be a good way to build the swabhimaan of the country. I am sure many people who are poor by income tax standards will pay Rs 5383 to buy their swabhimaan. If swabhimaan  sells, use it.  Why take away the opportunity of taking pride in their contribution to nation building from people?  Why hide the interdependence of people from each other and make them enemies, if we can make them understand and align towards nation building? 

We don’t need to go to history to look for swabhimaan, we can use swabhimaan to build the country and create swabhimaany Indians.