The face of Justice

There is enough outrage all around us – on the streets of off of it in the media, social media, political and social circles. I am not going to add to the noise.

Law & order, especially with regards to women in our country, some might laugh at me for taking up an easy job – the joke being that it should only require leaving the page blank, especially after what happened in Mainpuri and Bengaluru recently. While news reports have highlighted the fact that Mainpuri is the political stronghold of Mulayam Singh Yadav, I’m not interested. While several politicians have made outrageous comments on the Bengaluru incident, I am not surprised. I am an academician and my job is to examine.

I have lately been immersed in my meditations and this is what I find as regards connotations that certain related words carry: positive for Judgement, judge, just, and justice while negative for judgemental, and again positive for judicious. But, justice is what truly confounds. What is justice? Is it justice what punishment the judge prescribes after factoring his personal reading of the constitution? Does it become justice when the victim feels satisfied? Or, does it become justified when the public takes matter into its own hands?

During my meditations into the theory of Karma, I came across a line that has stayed with me: ‘Only what happens is justice’. That is, only what actually happens is justice, not what should have happened, not what could have happened had the situations been any different.

I have grappled with this line and doubted its sense for many years. How unfair it seems, how nonsensical! The incident that happened in Mainpuri, was that justice? The incident that happened in Bengaluru, was that justice? How could that be justice?

But, look closer and you’ll see it. When you breed a society based on patriarchy, one of the most common expressions of which is misogyny, what will you get? This, what happened in Mainpuri and Bengaluru is what you get. And I am sure this is one incident that got caught on tape, an anomaly.

Our men have no honour but that which resides in the chastity belt of the women around them. Our men have no power but that which resides in their political masters. Our Talk has no individual direction but that shown by other men steeped in their own sense of superiority. Our men are recruited into patriarchy before they learn to stand on their own and so, our self-expression for love is curbed, anger is encouraged as valour. The same anger in a woman is dealt with sticks and stones.

And so, what happened in Mainpuri is justice. What happened in Bengaluru is justice. In a society such as ours, this ugliness is the face of justice. If this karmic justice looks and feels like a nightmare, it’s time we woke up and sought recourse. As you sow, so shall you reap, goes the saying – justice in a capsule.

The recourse is in punishment, certainly – which is what we call as justice being done – and heavy punishment too but not only punishment. Recourse, according to the same theory of Karma is to acknowledge our faults. We, as a society, need this awakening.

We need to stop blaming our culture and need to take responsibility for it. If we fail to protect our women, we will fail our children, both our sons and daughters. Our families will be battlegrounds of ill-feeling, hypocrisy, and politics. Hate and fear will thrive where love should be. Women are not lesser because they are not strong and need protection. Men are failing themselves and their society by not being able to reassure the women of their freedom and safety.