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”.