Bihar : Where Kangaroo Courts Rule

Some years ago, I saw Prakash Jha’s brutal rendering of the Bhagalpur blindings in Gangajaal – Gangajaal being in this instance acid that was poured into the eyes of under trials incarcerated in the Bhagalpur central jail in about 1979-80. The outrage that resulted and the international media exposure began the end of Congress rule in Bihar.

After that, blindings, which probably never ended, didn’t get that much of publicity because under Lalu and later Rabri so much else was happening in Bihar.

But a recent news despatch from Patna again describes how in three separate incidents over 10 days, the eyes of three Dalit men were gouged out and they were left to fend for themselves. With little income and limited access to treatment, by the time they reached Patna Medical College, there was no hope of them ever again regaining their sight. No one is quite sure as to what crimes the Dalits had committed and if at all they committed any, what might have been the gravity of the same.

Reading about gouging out eyes like this, I was reminded of Hammurabi’s code, which I studied in school. Although the "eye for an eye" dictum is largely attributed to him, it is interesting that even in that day and age (I am talking about circa 1780 BC), he had standards and rules that regulated its enforcement though we may consider it primitive today. His eye for an eye dictum brought some measure of order into his lawless age. The code regulates in clear and definite strokes the organization of society.

The judge who blunders in a law case is to be expelled from his judgeship forever, and fined heavily. The witness who testifies falsely is to be slain. Indeed, all the heavier crimes are made punishable with death. Even if a man builds a house badly, and it falls and kills the owner, the builder is to be slain. If the owner’s son was killed, then the builder’s son is slain.

But what bothers me today is that while even Hammurabi close to four millennia ago had standards and rules that guided the circumstances in which the harshest punishment was to be administered, we seem in many instances to have none. For, a social sanction is all that is needed for the most brutal of sentences to be passed and executed. This happens all the more readily, if the perpetrator belongs to certain castes and the victim to another set of castes. In normal circumstances, most people would criticise kangaroo courts, but it must be acknowledged that such courts are at least courts with some semblance of protocol, procedures and discipline.

But in Bihar and several other rural places in what we often proudly call the heartland of our country, the gravity of the crime is not an issue, the procedures of sentencing is not an issue, the manner of how this is to be carried out is not an issue, lawyers and courts are not an issue. A bunch of people sitting on a string cot and calling themselves a caste panchayat or a biradiri panchayat can puff at their hookahs and pass sentence with accountability to none and it will be carried out. In our hinterland it would seem that we have lost the consciousness and humaneness, which even Hammurabi in his time seems to have displayed.