The Law of the Jungle by Mustafa Khan

The young people of India might not be seized of the great social disturbances marred with violence that they occasionally watch when the channels are changed. Such as the Meenas laying siege to the Gujjars protesting with the dead bodies of their kith and kin killed in the agitation/counter agitation on lawless roads and tracks in Rajasthan. Howsoever we may teach them that the TV is the idiot box, it does give sense to the events taking place around us. Last week on May 29, 2007 we had a young man tied by his wrists to a tree in the courtyard of the district session court in Agra. He was covered with snot, spittle, blood, sweat, and, of course, tears. The lawyers of the court were slapping him, punching him, spitting on him, hitting on his grotesquely shaved head and abusing him in all sorts of ways. All this went on for an hour as he stood stripped, with only his eyes moving around fully spread with fear.

Whatever be the cause and whoever he may be, no young person as well as many grown ups in this land of ours would like to suffer this to happen to a fellow human being. Such a situation testing your sufferance is in books you read in your curriculum. There is for example Lord of the Flies of William Golding. There is Simon who represents conscience in the novel. He tries to find out what frightens the little children who are evacuated from England during the Second World War and parachuted on an uninhabited island in the tropics. First the boys choose Ralph as their leader. Then Jack reasserts his right to be the natural leader and divides them. His group organizes attacks on the other group. At one such occasion they come upon Simon in the rain and act a play of killing a pig and ritually stab him to death. In the end only Ralph is left and then they hound him out of his hiding and are about to kill him when a ship anchors off shore and the captain saves Ralph.

If children are left to themselves, unattended by adults, they would lapse into primitive barbarity. Rule of law will give way to the rule of jungle. This is what happened in Agra court. But the society in the form of the bar council or human rights commission can apply the rule of law and check in such waywardness leading to criminal behaviour.

A lawyer Ravindra Singh set the other lawyers upon Vinod . Whether it was for refusing to marry a recommended girl is unimportant. That the abused is from a downtrodden caste is also unimportant. What is important is the rule of law has not entered in our blood to make us balk from such dastardly acts.

Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things also shows such a reflex. Inspector Thomas taps the bosom of Amma with his stick as if he were picking up mangoes from the shop. He threatens to shave her hair (as the cops wantonly do to the sex workers in their utter lawlessness). He was angry that Velutha the downtrodden had dared to love Amma. The death of the child is accidental but the vested police and family members conspire a la the lawyers in Agra to frame Velutha. Even his own father takes out the artificial eye gifted to him by the rich family to return to them since his son had dishonoured the elite family. His custodial death at the hands of the police is a metaphor of the rule of jungle. Do the youth match up their curriculum with the stark reality of the day?
Indeed, outlawry has become the law of the land. To screen Parzania even the constitution and the criminal law are helpless. Another side of the same coin is Dara Mody moving out of the Gulberga society. Why should he leave the Muslim neighbourhood? “It is just a question of who can fight back better.” We pray his son should survive and be found out as was Ralph before the eerie law of the jungle of Jacks and jackals engulfs all!