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By Ritwik Agrawal | July 17, 2010 2:38 am

Ours is a law-loving country.  Deprivation, oppression and crime are rampant. However our esteemed leadership cannot be accused of not doing enough legislatively to contain these problems. It’s a different matter that our bewildering gamut of laws usually end up multiplying aforesaid problems.

Readers would hardly need reminding of the far-sighted legislation that imposed a blanket ban on smoking in public places. Every major college and university now have big boards that declare them to be no smoking zones. Of course, this has caused all professors in say, JNU to give up smoking overnight. If there exists a place where this glorious objective has not been achieved then that is a lacuna of implementation. Of course, there could be nothing wrong with the law itself, even if it is making law breakers out of all us.

Or we could take the Punjab Excise Act, 1914 which somehow applies to Delhi and which bans the sale of alcohol to those under 25 years of age. I feel tempted to repeat the oft quoted line about being mature enough to vote and drive at 18 …

The latest such initiative comes from the Women and Child Development Ministry. This department has already given us controversial legislation like the Prevention of Domestic Violence Act and the Dowry Prohibition Act, which though noble in spirit, are overly susceptible to misuse. Earlier this year, the Ministry saw a change of guard when the last minister lost her Lok Sabha seat. There was  some hope that her successor will not display excessive zeal but would instead focus on deliverables.

This time, though, the Ministry has outdone itself, thus sending out an emphatic signal that it will continue to battle common sense regardless of changes at the top.

So what has happened? The Times of India reports that the Ministry is “piloting” a legislation that will make it possible for the authorities to penalize and even jail parents who beat their kids. In fact, it goes beyond that as the “comprehensive” draft bill, which not surprisingly, has been drafted after consultations with “civil society” seeks to prevent the abuse of children by parents, schools, day care centres, workplaces etc etc. It even seeks to cover ragging.

Of course, any effort to strengthen the legal framework to deal with child abuse is laudable, but some salient features of the proposed legislation require closer examination:

The proposed punishment for the first offence is one year imprisonment or a fine of Rs 5,000 that can be raised to three years’ imprisonment for a second offence with a fine of Rs 25,000.

Maybe I am reading this wrong. But the above seems to say that if ever this law is passed and implemented [which in India, as noted above, are two very different things] then any reasonably well off parent can get off by paying a paltry fine. However the same amount can be backbreaking for any of the country’s countless poor people. Maybe I ought to have more faith in our police system, but I cannot let go off the idea that this gives yet another tool for unscrupulous policemen to harass and torture the poor. Might it be that  the “civil society” activists who have consulted on the bill missed this insignificant detail?

The draft bill says, “Whoever intentionally inflicts physical penalty on a child for disciplinary purposes shall be punished for the offence of corporal punishment.”

Whoever means “family member, school, relatives, neighbours, friends, educational or care giving institutions, prisons and homes set up under the Juvenile Justice Act.” Again, maybe it’s just me but this seems awfully broad ranging. What will happen in case of a fight between two children, say one who is 14 and the other 17 ? Maybe the aggressor could be sent to one of our homely juvenile justice homes, which we can expect to be homelier still once this bill has been cleared.

It is obvious that the proposed bill is yet another act of over-zealousness which seeks to achieve social objectives by force of law, rather than investing in necessary social and cultural reform. It will be non-implementable, because of its sheer impracticality. That does not bother me as much as the fact that unlike the equally stupid anti-smoking law, the proposed bill has inherently greater scope for misuse and harassment.

Comments (6)

By Ritwik Agrawal | July 19, 2009 3:55 am

Its common to say – “this only happens in India”. Perversely, a lot of Indians have even begun saying this with a degree of affection for the chaos prevalent in this country.

To balance this perspective somewhat, and also as a concerned “citizen of the world”, I present to you a deeply unsettling development that hasn’t happened in India (yet):

The British Government has drawn up new guidelines “to help prevent unsuitable people from working with children and vulnerable adults.” A new body called the Independent Safeguaring Authority has been established which is responsible for issuing licenses to anybody who wants to work or volunteer with the aforementioned vulnerable sections of society.

I’ll just say it again: anybody intending to work or volunteer with kids, even an author who wants to read out pages from a book, will need to be certified as safe by a quasi-government body.

This is so incredible that I cannot find words to express my outrage. So I leave that to a professional writer:

It seems to be fuelled by a combination of prurience, sexual fear and cold political calculation, when you go into a school as an author or an illustrator you talk to a class at a time or else to the whole school. How on earth — how on earth — how in the world is anybody going to rape or assault a child in those circumstances? It’s preposterous.”
-Phillip Pullman

I would like to add that this move seems to have resulted from an absurd kind of political correctness, one that runs like “kids should be protected at all costs, even at the cost of social sanity”.

This really has brought home to me the sheer extent to which governments have started entering people’s life. What the f*** happened to the counter culture? Where is the universal declaration of human rights? How is this even possible under a democratic regime?

Charlie’s Diary talks about the considerable ill effects of such a move, and the very real danger of false positives.

But beyond that,  this sucks also because it makes the system extremely unforgiving. There is simply no scope for an offender to reform. Commit one offence, or even be doubted of an offence and the government can bar you from working in a school, or in a day care centre, or as a school bus driver, presumably even as a traffic warden.

I can only hope and pray that common sense will prevail and the ISA will be dismantled.