Mentality of Law: Legal Research Paradigms-Conclusions

Mentality of Law:

Legal Research Paradigms-Conclusions

It is the common belief, agreeably, that no research is complete. Therefore, nor the research discourse, on a chosen subject, is amenable to a conclusion. Reasons are diverse. Social problems are never simple. There are, of a research problem, aspects which are manifest. It also partakes areas latent. The latter may be product of failure of human cognitive movements and achievements hitherto. Or alternatively, can be results of the designs of human language and marvel construction of methods and methodology of knowledge creation.

On the other hand, except the paradigm of study, the social research, enquiry conditions are uncontrolled because the system, institutions or the unit of the society which is comprised in the investigation problem, is beyond the control of the researcher. In contrast, scientific (natural) experiments are conducted in a controlled laboratory conditions, results of which may be tested and repeatedly reproduced. Yet this credence of scientific studies has come under challenge from time and again.[1] The disciplines of Quantum Physics/Mechanics, has now challenged the fundamental scientific theories and concepts of traditional natural sciences, in terms of their claim to truth. In a sense, then, both the kinds of investigative exercises have come to be centered, for their acceptability, on the criterion or idea of validity rather than truthfulness of the findings or conclusion.

After all these said, one may remember the task of formulating conclusion. Spivak observes:

And if the assumption of responsibility for one's discourse leads to the conclusion that all conclusions are genuinely provisional and therefore inconclusive, that all origins are similarly unoriginal, that responsibility itself must cohabit with frivolity, this need not be cause for gloom.[2]

Thoughts of Man & Minds of Community

Acceptability and validity of propositions produced are felicitated, within the community, by the conditions determined through the information available in the community. This statement appears to be abstract. We need to clarify it a little. Let’s say, a person is apart being a member of the ‘kingdom of the animals’ (to use Hume), is a bundle of information, experiences, and perceptions etc., . majority of it is poured into her by the culture, history, traditions etc., in which she finds herself. Millions of instances of such information are accumulated from the moment the human person is borne. Collectively, then, the community is a storehouse of sum-total of such experiences. The intuitive idea is that, it is the individual who have to manage that volume of information, the society has no similar cognitive capacities. Rules, legal philosophy and propositions accompanied with other social norms are involved in managing experiences and information. The exercise, in the contemporary times, is monopolized by the modern state and state law.

These ideas are sufficient to drive the point that determinations of sociological and anthropological understanding of institutions, concepts, and norms existent in the past is crucial. Thus, nature of perhaps all legal research is destined, within this paradigm, to be exploratory in possible future and actual past.

Minds of Liberal Law

The greatest problem with the liberal legal philosophy of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century modernism is that they deny this crucial connection. And a system of law and legal institutions are invented in the abstract.

The subject of state, state law and authority, in the twenty first century, can no longer be seen, as part of the mere problem of political obligation. The paradigmatic of such an approach pushes away the crucial anthropological elements producing imageries of a system in which the human being is reduced to and fitted into a machine driven by its own sub-system: a particular system of market.

Law, Literature and Reasonings of Right(s)

The modern law derives its substance from a specific structure of language and ‘literary crafts’. Almost in every instance, it is cast in the language of modern rights (or its cognates: i.e., duties, liabilities etc.,). The latter carries away law from the features and characteristics which forms the unique peculiarities and properties the literature affords (Hindi or English). In literature, the meaning and consequently substance of a piece is not determined by the structure of that language. Individual as an enormous bundle of information and experience different from every other, is free to interact with and interpret the literary writing. Exactly, opposite is true for modern liberal law. Law, legal education and lawyering prepares the ground for every person to artificially disown his self-perception in the sense explained above.

Meaning to every piece of literary crafts in law; called ‘positive rule’ is supplied by the immutable theoretical constructs of the Western legal philosophy. The production of this cognitive capacity is so strong and complete that categories of law and legal concepts have same or similar meaning and substance throughout the entire spectrum of the so-called contemporary civilizations. Thus, rights or human rights discourse, is able to bring diverse cultures, histories, and people, formally, on the same page. It is in this sense that 'comparativism' in all discourses, including law, appears to be fascinating.

The system of market at the global level could not have been achieved in the absence of production of a situation of dis-remembrance of historical actualities of person, institutions and the society. On the other hands, conceptual categories in rights have in no instance been conceived to be self-content and complete. As a result, different elements of it continue to grow. Thus, every day new aspects of a specific right are born through court judgements or state policy decisions; or more often de-facto demand is generated by the market. The civil society too come as a participant in the rights formative interactions. People rejoice, professionals celebrate, and Governments claim pride in them!!

Intuitive idea is that, completeness to the concept of a particular rights’ notion, its construct(s) or to its aspect can never be supplied by mere philosophic discourse and theoretical analysis. Self- contentedness into it can only be ensured by acknowledging the fact and recognizing necessities of human existence, where the human person, bundle of experiences and society as store house do not lose their actual self-imageries. For instance, one may very well produce problems such as access to (safe) drinking water or primary education, a vast majority of population suffers in the South.

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[1]     See generally, Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962, 2012).

[2]     Gayatri Chakravarti Spivak’ translator’ Preface to Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology xiii (1974, 1997).

Posted By: Chanchal Kumar Singh, Assistant Professor of Law, HPNLU Shimla

UTOPIAN BUILDING-BLOCKS OF KARL MARX: GERMAN CRITICAL TRADITION AND BEYOND

Marxism as an ideological alterative, once dominating the world stage, especially before the fall of Berlin Wall, has today disappeared from the praxis. Some of the world powers, such as, China and Russia, are merely keeping the mask upfront, behind its veil, the state owned capitalist 'mode of production' is prevalent. Karl Marx, one of the greatest social scientists at the same time utopians, was the product of German rational tradition which has credit to cultivate some of the greatest thinkers of all time, including, Immanuel Kant, Hegel, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Frederich Nietzsche, and Jurgen Habermas. It is ‘Copernican Revolution’, brought by Immanuel Kant in epistemology, which helped in innovating the human agency into the action through ‘mediated knowledge’. In that sense, objectivity was conceived by Kant not as an isolated island, but it is intuition that shapes the vision of objective truth. Hegel, on the other hand, qualifies all the subjective notions of good and evil by ‘historical consciousness’, in a way, subjectivity takes the hue and saturation of historicity. To move in an alternative paradigm, one of the masters of suspicion, Nietzsche discovers about the culture, which is as per him, a medium to establish all the dominant moral principles, which define and limit the very of good and evils. For him, it is master morality which is subjugated by 'herd' one. The last man and the sick man do establish the empire of grace and virtue which effectively alter the enriched lives of master men. However, to the contrary, Karl Marx progresses with his diagnosis of ‘historical materialism’ in a fashion which rejects the cultural analysis in place of economic one. He writes in The Communist Manifesto:

“All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is frofaned, and men at last are forced to face the real conditions of their lives and their relations with their fellow men” (Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848).

The materialistic imagination of Marx with dialectical rigour produces one of the profane works of all time. Marxian praxis is later revolutionized by several Neo-Marxist thinkers, for example, Antonio Gramsci. His Prison Notebooks laid down the ultimate foundation of subaltern study; an alternative reading of historical traces, which brings forth ‘Orientalism’, a paradigmatic sift in historicity, in the leadership of Edvard Said, Talal Asad, Ashis Nandi, Gaytri Chakravrati Spivak, Ranjit Guha, and many more. Neo-Marxist tradition moves ahead from the idea of ‘Commodity Fetishism’ to the consciousness of ‘Reification’. Frankfurt School in Germany, in the able leadership of Max Horkheimer and Adorno do discover a hazardous industry in form of 'culture', which has precariously affected the human mind in quest of commodity and entertainment. Violence and vulgarity do become the attractive commodity to buy and sell. The culture of no culture, in form of 'multi-culturalism' has transcending effects, which does create the structures and categories of robotic homo sapiens, who cannot challenge, either pre-established means or end, but the masses are willing to work with ease and smoothness under ready-made cultural mentality. The hyper-real world has exposed and condemned a real one to its ugliness and contempt. For no subaltern study is capable to create a conscious citizenry environment unless cybernetics governance, in form of mass deception is rejected. For a manifesto of dissent, in Gandhian way could be vital, in bringing back the autonomous human agency, through social collectives, in form of idyllic village community. Marxian building block for future is seen with suspicion by many thinkers, including Nehru and Gandhi. In words of Karl Popper:

“That the Utopian method, which chooses an ideal state of society as the aim which all our political actions should serve, is likely to produce violence can be shown thus. Since we cannot determine the ultimate ends of political actions scientifically, or by purely rational methods, differences of opinion concerning what the ideal state should be like cannot always be smoothed out by the method of argument. They will at least partly have the character of religious differences. And there can be no tolerance between these different Utopian religions. Utopian aims are designed to serve as a basis for rational political action and discussion, and such action appears to be possible only if the aim is definitely decided upon. Thus the Utopianist must win over, or else crush, his Utopianist competitors who do not share his own Utopian aims, and who do not profess his own Utopianist religion. But he has to do more. He has to be very thorough in eliminating and stamping out all heretical competing views. For the way to the Utopian goal is long. Thus the rationality of his political action demands constancy of aim for a long time ahead; and this can only be achieved if he not merely crushes competing Utopian religions, but as far as possible stamps out all memory of them. The use of violent methods for the suppression of competing aims becomes even more urgent if we consider that the period of Utopian construction is liable to be one of social change. In such a time ideas are liable to change also. Thus what may have appeared to many as desirable at the time when the Utopian blueprint was decided upon may appear less desirable at a later date. If this is so, the whole approach is in danger of breaking down. For if we change our ultimate political aims while attempting to move towards them we may soon discover that we are moving in circles. The whole method of first establishing an ultimate political aim and then preparing to move towards it must be futile if the aim may be changed during the process of its realization. It may easily turn out that the steps so far taken lead in fact away from the new aim. And if we then change direction in accordance with our new aim we expose ourselves to the same risk. In spite of all the sacrifices which we may have made in order to make sure that we are acting rationally, we may get exactly nowhere” (Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations).

In the end, I am of the opinion that Gandhian ideals of suraj (self-governance), appears to be a constructive method, to protect the sanctity of life goals as well as the means in achieving it. Gandhian vision of life is a challenging one which rewrites the principles of governance as per the governance of Being and Self. Only ethical transformation could alleviate all the human sufferings. The poverty of dialectical imaginations have been producing many an impoverished world citizens. The cosmopolitan vision of life in sense of Kant and Gandhi has something to offer to counter against ‘alienated life’ (Marx, Philosophical Manuscript).  

Published by: Mritunjay Kumar (Assistant Professor, Law Centre-II, University of Delhi).

Credence about Market, Law, and Democratic Life

Many Indian students of law have tried to discover central features of the law received from Common Law (Baxi- 1986; Karst, Ghai, & Baxi- 21 Cardozo L. Rev. 1183, 2000; Baxi- 2002; Parekh- Baxi ed. 1986; Bilgrami-2014). It is cast in the language of rights justified by the so called progressive/liberal philosophy, which forms essential condition for working of a system of market. The most important features of this phenomenon of law are: one, it is pregnant with an enormous quantity of coercion and force (Kelsen-1946), two, it essentially carries away it’s subjects from themselves. The latter point very often eludes our capacity of comprehension (See, the concept of structures of Derrida, Bradley-2008).  The issue can be understood with imageries of the structure and character of law re-constructed on the basis of substance of the rules under Article 21 of the Constitution of India and Section 378 of the Indian Penal Code. Every person has right to life, ‘life with dignity’. It is taken to be perfectly legitimate and expected from every one that one may be dying for lack of food or medicine yet she must abide by prescriptions of rules in the Penal Code. This structure goes two steps ahead and convinces her neighbor(s) to continue to be happy in plenty (Cf. Derridean ‘Animal’- Critical Inquiry, Vol. 28, No. 2, Winter, 2002)). The annihilation of social character of sources of wellbeing, then, presupposes the total destruction of charismatic appeal transcendental in the traditional conception of law and institutions, for its subjects. Commodification of resources can serve hardly purposes determined, in the absence of a ‘resource’ market comes into existence in human beings themselves (Agamben-1998, Polanyi-1944). Freedom of will and freedom of action as ends are forgotten way back, human beings are denied even entitlements originating in natural animal instincts. The consequent rise of state and state sovereignty rationalized through idea of liberty then translate into unilateral liberty of Bentham (Bowring-1843, Vol. I) of the person to submit to the authority and power of the sovereign and its subordinate symbols (Agamben-1998). Our dying person has necessarily to renounce his freedom of will and action and to submit to the standards of the Penal Code. The entire structure works towards accomplishing, what we can appropriately call, the animalization of human race. Private tyrannies are established using the very state law (private-public dichotomy) as an essential outcome/end of the structure to be mediated conveniently. The tyrannies are operated by the powers and dogmatic rationality co-inhabiting in oligarchies in the so called free market.

When law, legal institutions or as the case may be, idea of state is developed on strength of or drawn from liberal foundations of natural, claim, entitlement, merit or deserts basis of right, the structure has achieved its formative completion. But the structure keeps transforming the fundamental categories of the law: equality, institution of property, and state etc., that are never complete yet directions of progress are determinate. Instances of general classifications of right into negative and positive or of belonging to different generations, moves the structure and the dichotomy from lower to higher level of the ends of oligarchism. For example, if a notion of right to the basic need, water is traced and found to be in natural principle, so is the western economic doctrines and notions of liberty of the bourgeoise and of modern neo-liberal institutions such as multinational corporations or the theory of invisible hands in the capitalist free market (Nozick-1971).

The conception of law, we are trying to challenge, shares unique relationships, if we venture to discover, with the modern state. Both, in one way or other, is believed to be begetter of the other, simultaneously becomes the owner and the owned for the other. Such characterizations would have baffled modern great sociologists such as Weber or Ehrlich (i.e. Weber-1930; Nelken-Theoretical Inquiries in Law 9.2 (2008). It is, thus, sufficiently revealed, that seminal sociological as well as philosophical studies of law hitherto have not been able to realize that the ‘structures’ and ends operate quite above law, legal categories, and the institution of state is not integral parts of the former.  Bureaucracy, the most vicious creation of human beings (Chomsky-1977) is not to be seen parts/limbs of state but that of structure along with the market oligarchism. Specific form of democracy practiced, in liberal states are, hence, instrumentalist links of the structure by which it manipulates units (law, institutions, rights etc., through ‘governance’).

 Contractorization of governance both, government posts and public services are merely intended by the structure at, what Spivak calls, proletarianization of population (Landry & MacLean-1996) progressively reduce democracy which are found to be inimical to the survival and smooth functioning of the system. An idea, contrary to the general constructed public belief, but pivotal to the process is that the frequency of interface between law and individuals has geometrically increased in last three decades (the point still awaits an extensive investigation). The increased ubiquity of this interface is exemplified by new phenomenon of multiplicity of non-legislative/sovereign laws. By-laws, rules regulation, by virtue of secrecy inherent in their making and undemocratic character of existence and implementation, go well with the designs of the market oligarchy. The credence that we are living in a freer society and governed by a democratic legal system, need to be re-examined so that our belief does not rest on dogmatic faith(s) but is rationally supported!

When we think of dogmatism and rationality in the above context, the most important section of that structure is the judicial system. The entire object of the enforcement machinery can be summed up as programmatic attempts to infuse humanization into the appearance of the structure. It is a fact that court system (including legal advocacy), in India, survives not on the fact that it delivers justice in disputes brought before it but on the psychic fear of harassment and injustices potentially present for every prospective seekers of legal remedy. Innovative institutional processes, for example, public interest litigation or legal aids, uniquely integrated to this part of the structure as charity was the greatest project for re-cultivating civility about the judicial system. In some way, humanization efforts save the structure from reaching its breaking points. The great souls (Iyer & Bhagwati JJ.) who brought specific tools (PIL, Legal Aid services) were certainly disasters for India as system and a people.

The cultivated civility which the humanization project produces also brings an all-encompassing attitude of uncritical loyalty to the parts as well as towards the structure in its entirety. I think, this is the very first and last reason which have so far kept decapacitated the whole set of legal academic from undertaking and producing alternative reading/understanding of the Constitution, law or democracy. We do not have academic works providing Commonsensical reading of the Constitution. The major works written within the Common Law tradition of scholarship (Seervai 1991-96; Basu-2017; Shukla-2016; Jain-2014; Austin-1966, 2004 etc.,) fall under either of the following three categories: ‘encyclopedic’ inhibiting development of critical reflection and capacity building (i.e. Basu, Shukla); ‘legalistic/technological’  on the working of the court system sunning empiricism and facts (Seervai); and the last ‘romanticizational’(i.e. Austin- 1966 & 2004)  capitalizing and feeding upon the beauty and sublime (see Ch: Retrospect, Hipple Jr. ed. 1957) sentiments/desires of people. Popularity of these works owes much to the imageries of thought in which we describe the so called fundamental concepts in Constitution, law or of democracy. Kant would add, ‘the categories to which we refer and the inferences by which we interpret them. The imageries, concepts, referents, and inferences of interpretations present swanky (exclusionary) ‘prism of semiotics’ obscuring/inhibiting alternatives. Semantics and epistemology or methods and things falling in such categories cannot form points of reference (Chanchal-Sml L. Rev. 2018). The calamitous justices added to the swankiness of the ‘prism of concepts’ by devising lenses of PIL, Legal Aid and Services. It could be described to be attempt to regenerate and prevent the judicial system from nose diving crash. Since then the new images of judicial process have generated and constructed its own referents/prism.  

The programmatic imagination would require, I think, alternative epistemic categories constructed upon the genius and cultural foundations, a semantics that can transcend the swanky prisms of law, market, and courts. ‘For constitutions are always in the nature of organic (evolutionary in historical sense) growth’ (Aggarwal-1944). But above all a semiotic structure that does not feed upon but leads to lessening the gaps between ideals/norms and fact, actions/conduct. Such a programmatic project has potential to rescue scholarship from what, we may call-an analogy of Ravana- the mythical king of ancient Sri Lanka, ‘Ravanic disorder’. (according to mythology Ravana had knowledge of what is good conduct, just, and virtuous yet he remained enslaved to his own habitude). Market, law and so called constitutional democracy envisions and establish illusionary life & world visions in a double sense. Which the life of Ravana symbolizes.   The project, by its nature must involve reconstruction of Indian ancient institutions and normative categories in their evolutionary sense/course, were it left uninterrupted by the Western academic violence. It was the academic attack that almost finished Indigenous administrative, legal and constitutional system. Otherwise, the ancient systems had survived with vitality all other kind of violence over thousands of years of their existence. 

Posted By: Chanchal Kumar Singh, Assistant Professor of Law, HPNLU Shimla

Baffling Structure of Academia: A case against Certificatory Sovereignty

Life was vibrantly alive when we as the human animal had less tendency to ponder upon structure or institutions but to run after "bio-energy", like a "noble savage" (Rousseau, A discourse upon the origin of inequality) used to travel after many a uncertain truths, without thinking about velocity, mass, or gravitation. Life was difficult and, of course every difficult thing was life. It was a brave new world, conceptualized through the classical European philosophical tradition which converted "Human" into Citizen, if I may add further, "Human Resources". Then the epistemological convergence of "Nature", which was conceptualized in Oriental tradition as sacred; an organic life, into "natural resources" (Aqeel Bilgrami, Secularism, Identity, and Disenchantment), that was a strategic move to master, not only nature as the natural resources, but to fellow humans as the object to be exploited. This convergence was the degradation of Life, from ferociousness to mastery or expertise (Rousseau, The First Discourse), whereby "others" lost the very subjectivity, the voice, and was reduced into mere subalternatity (Antonio Gramci, Prison Notebook).

Slavery was the outcome of this way of thinking, similarly bureaucracy was encouraged, to sustain and to maintain various hegemonic structures, encompassing Feudalism, Capitalism, and Neo-Liberalism. Life was moving into no direction, but trapped in  "State of indistiction between hope and despair" (Georgio Agamben, Homo Sacer). However, certifications flourished everywhere to certify all the academic and moral intellects, even though, apparently missing or visible at first reading (by love or suspicion). Life in a modern society is "bare life" (Georgio Agamben, Homo Sacer) without ornamental certificatory Sovereignty. Academic Structure is proudly staring at everyone whoever is asking for its accessibility. After all certificates are here to be materialized and life is here to be realized.

Posted by: Mrityunjay Kumar Singh
Research Scholar, Faculty of Law, University of Delhi.

Truth and Knowledge: A spiral sphere of Illusion to Truth

History of knowledge lies in aspirations of mankind to unravel the beautiful harmonious set up of natural kingdom. Life and sustainability owe much to this quest of mankind; started with myth to divine rules, and later science brings its shadow over primordial understandings. Though, all knowledge is human’s knowledge (Kant), but there must be a huge world of knowledge to which mankind has not ever imagined to reach there. Empiricism, though brings Newtonian certainty and verifiability of a hypothesis, but even a keen observer has his own limitations to ascertain the truth, he might be caught in illusion like prior understanding vis-à-vis Earth and Sun. Enlightenment values transformed the world, and brought Marx, Darwin, Freud, and Einstein into the same place. Notion such as, theory of two worlds were considered as a daydream of Plato, even his disciple Aristotle thought that his teacher has looked up this world into different direction what it seems after empirical observation. Man, instead of born with innate ideas, is born with innate reason. But what happens with this reason once religious animosity and exclusion brings lots of bloodshed and homicide; Man appears as brutish, nasty, short (Hobbes). Leviathan take cares after every subject and State becomes a form of ultimate reason (Hegel); a hypothetical social contract which brings democracy at work (Rousseaeu). In a battle between majority and minority utilitarian garbs its place in policy making to its executions (Bentham). Rule of law and democracy were impossible idea to work unless minimum guarantee of rights is fixed (Dworkin). Lockean inalienable rights proposition coupled with idea off written constitution (Madison) do brings certainty in life of Man. But what next? When today’s knowledge becomes ignorance of tomorrow; in a post-truth world, realpolitik becomes a tool of narcissism and xenophobia, and Machiavellian classical dictum suggests; “it is better to be feared than loved but not despised” (The Prince). Idea of justice has failed to replace ‘might is right.’ No Rawlsian difference principle has a place in a society living, in fact, behind the veil of ignorance ‘forever.’ Sadly but true, Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’ rule is at its work, i.e., the more you wield the power the more you are a reasonable being. But I believe this naturalism must not continue. The very idea of State is related to justice with all irrespective caste, creed, race, or language. That text of justice would be an empty slogan unless every common is out of that platonic cave; ignorance is no more bliss in a democracy. The very existence of good life depends upon empowerment of every being from lower to middle and upper strata. More we invest in human resources better we’ll produce for tomorrow. Role of a State must be pro-active to insulate civic virtues among its citizens (Aristotle). Virtue of civic ethics can never dwell behind mythology; it will come out with logic and experience. In a post truth world GANDHI is looking to come back with an idea; be true to yourself; all knowledge is within you.

Posted by : Mrityunjay Kumar Singh

Assistant Professor, Campus Law Centre,University of Delhi

LATHICHARGE CULTURE IN A POST MODERN INDIA ; A CONSERVATIVE DISPLACEMENT FROM CITIZENSHIP TO SUBJECT

Lathicharge culture has its origin from British, nay brutish colon (See, Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness), a culture nurtured for the sake of oppression and terrorization, to divide and rule. Violence, as a means behoves to those pre-civilizational era where law and language had no role to play, in fact, 'might' was the sole instrument for the survival amidst conflict ridden state of nature. Very essence of modern day civilization lies in politics of right, politics of justice, and politics of good governance, but unfortunately politics of violence and counter-violence has become a norm of the day in public space. In Greek civilization, division between Oikos and Polis (private and public space) was meant to ensure a public space,  governed by freedom of speech and persuasion in solving various conflicting interests, however a private space was preserved where slaves, and animals were subjugated by violence. Public space ensured  public participation and voluntary exercise of freedom of choices for common welfare. To the contrary, in modern day civilization, private and public space has almost obliterated; consequently, Gandhian method, i.e., Civil obedience is being frequently used to coerce authorities for unethical demands, at the same time, administrators behave like a divine king, ready to inflict injury if someone has a louder voice to raise; most of the people are abusive towards foreign ideas; the large majorities are guided by reflective judgments over determinant judgments (See, Kant, Critique of Judgment), looking every case in perspective of urge and disgust; a bureaucratic culture, inherited from Englishmen, has destroyed a sense of community we Indians had in ancient India (See, Gandhi, Hind Swaraj). It was an era of expropriation (See, Weber's inquiry on Indian Society, See also, Marc Galanter, The Displacement of Traditional Law in Modern India) of fraternal spirit Indians were known for; unfortunately, modern day politics in India is more or less replica of formalisation, rationalisation, and bureaucratization (See, R M Unger, Law in Modern Society) what Englishmen invented in the leaderships of Hobbes, Bentham, Austin, and of course, Macaulay.

BHU administration has done exactly what is being carried on by most of the authorities, in modern India. Why to blame a few political parties; this shame is on us; when will we (Government, or citizens) behave like a mature democracy where freedom of speech is invaluable and nonnegotiable over instinctive and prejudiced violence? Stop abusive cultures and behave like a civilized being, otherwise no flight on Moon or Mars will escape you from commonly observed animal fate (Might is right)!

Posted by Mrityunjay Kumar Singh

Assistant Professor, University of Delhi

A CONFESSION OF A LYNCHING MAN

My dear fellow citizens, I'm a lynching man. I have no individual identity, in fact, I'm searching it under the disguise of mob. Yes! I'm a lynching Man; who knows how to try a case on the street. Believe me! I'm a blood thirsty judge, who kills innocence for the sake of dogma. I know, however, that the basic foundation of human civilization lies in scientific knowledge, but my faith does not allow me to search the truth. For me, the grammar of knowledge is an instrument of coward; I develop hysteria, an environment of suspicion and terror; this makes me powerful like a Leviathan. My trial is, of course, not for justice, because I don't want to expose myself as a weak fellow. For that purpose, one needs to read moral prescriptions and laws, which I hate doing. I convict a person before the completion of trial. Tell me, Isn't it an example of speedy trial? People fear what they don't know, in a way, I'm a merchant of darkness, who knows how to play with emotions. Ironically, a bright side of emotion makes me a beautiful human being, to the contrary, the dark side of it gives me strengths and motivation to terrorize somebody who doesn't conform to my dogmatic belief. Victim asks me for pardon, but I choose to remain like a king who never retracts from earlier conviction. After all, I'm a lynching man; who is a witness of many a bill of attenders. Now, I'm the law, and I'm the Court, and mind it, I'm not in search of validity or efficacy of law, as long as, I can terrorize anybody by brute powers. I don't, of course, forget to show my gratitude towards mob; those, who are emotional fools, make my day; they're my real source of strength. Because, as long as a society forgets to heed humanism, and accepts dogma as a guiding principle, a merchant of darkness like me will easily bath in blood of innocence. Yes! I confess, I'm a lynching man; a son of lynching Republic.


Posted By: Mrityunjay Kr. Singh (Research Scholar, Faculty of Law, University of Delhi)

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