Forbidding Expression – Part 1

The question that faces West Bengal, a state in eastern India [1], appears to be whether a Bangladeshi author named Taslima Nasreen should be allowed to stay. The recent news is that “a minority fringe group” has demanded that Taslima be deported.

The answer is absolutely clear to me: she may stay or go depending on what the law of the land says. Rule of law is something that I consider non-negotiable. So the deeper question is whether India at large, and West Bengal more specifically, is a nation that is governed by laws? Or is it that those who carry the largest sticks, those who can inflict punishment on the nation can dictate what the rules should be?

Unfair and Unlovely

An accident is not a crime, and a crime is not an accident. That distinction kept playing in my mind as I thought of the incident in which a drunken driver, Alistair Pereira, killed seven and injured eight pavement dwellers in Mumbai one night last November. The case against him was ruled to be one of rash driving and not one of culpable homicide by a court. Pereira was handed down a six-month prison sentence and a fine of Rs 5 lakhs (approximately US$ 11,000.)

Life is Cheap

Very cheap in India. Alistair Pareira, a 21 year old, in a fit of drunken driving, ran over a bunch of sleeping people a few months ago in Mumbai. He successfully killed seven (including one pregnant woman and two children) and injured eight others.

Those who died were poor. The judgement was that it was a case of rash driving. The judge Ajit Mishra ruled that the drunken driver was not guilty of culpable homicide but was just guilty of rash driving.

The driver is a rich kid. It is amazing how badly the police mess up an investigation when rich people are invovled in a crime.

The Decline of Violence

If you are in the mood for some thought-provoking hope-giving reading this weekend, I recommend Steven Pinker’s essay “The History of Violence“:

In the decade of Darfur and Iraq, and shortly after the century of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao, the claim that violence has been diminishing may seem somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. Yet recent studies that seek to quantify the historical ebb and flow of violence point to exactly that conclusion.

[Hat tip: Yuvaraj.]

Of Buffaloes and Children

The basic law of economics, of supply and demand, is a bitch. Like gravity, it is all-pervasive and you would have as much success overturning it as overturning the law of gravitational attraction or inventing the much sought after perpetual motion machine. It is primarily ignorance of basic physical conservation laws that makes inventors of perpetual motion machines attempt the impossible. A similar lamentable ignorance of economics also impels people to act as if the iron law of supply and demand can be ignored.