The previous column talked about how lokpals of all shades can fail because the spirit of laws can be violated while proving that their letter has not been violated. I will explain my stand with examples from both our times and mythology. First our times. let me take the case of a TV interview of RJD leader Raghuvansh Prasad Singh by a noted journalist. The interview was after RJD chief lalu Prasad Yadav was arrested in the fodder scam in 1997. He stepped down as Bihar Chief Minister after his arrest and his wife Rabri Devi, a complete stranger to public service, became Chief Minister after being elected leader of RJD legislators in the State Assembly.
The interviewer, a lady, asked Raghuvansh if there was no leader in his party with some credentials of public service whom it could choose as its legislative leader in place of lalu. She could not explicitly express the widely held view that lalu was ruling the State and his party by proxy through his wife. If that was the case, it clearly was a violation of the spirit of democracy. Democracy, in my view, is all about people voting for persons they feel will serve them, and not just their own interests. The key here is serving the people.
Raghuvansh said in the interview that RJD felt Rabri was the best choice as its leader after lalu. The violations of law at the level of its spirit happen at the subtle levels of the recesses of the mind. These violations may be very obvious, but cannot be established in courts of law or other public domains because these domains seek material proof. The violation of the spirit of a law amounts to complete violation of the law. But evidence of this kind of violation can very cleverly not made evident at the material level, the level of the letter in which the law exists. This letter tries to capture the spirit of the law.
It can never be proved whether the spirit with which RJD made Rabri its leader was a violation of democracy. So it was in the interview. Raghuvansh could not convince the journalist, and I am sure many who held her view, that Rabri was a true democratic choice of RJD. And the journalist, like many others, could not prove that Rabri was not a true democratic choice. All the proving and disproving had necessarily to be done at the material or manifest level of words and letters. The real issue, however, was the intent, character or spirit of RJD’s decision, something whose real nature can never be truly manifested or established in the material realm of proof and evidence governed by reason and rationality.
That takes me to the word ‘spirit’ again. It is a mysterious word, for it is not really a word. It is a word for something that by its very definition cannot be caught in words. Many rationalists and intellectuals grounded solely in the world of proof and evidence rubbish with all their might the very notion of a spirit behind anything. Even the possibility of a spirit does many things to them. It means their understanding of the world and all it holds is, contrary to their seemingly final view based on real and hard (translate material) evidence, incomplete and shallow. By its definition, even its theoretical existence means that the spirit of anything is its very essence, its gist or core, existing at its deepest or highest level. If that is indeed the case, as it might be, its inverse is that the level of matter, and all the plainly material evidence that supports just this level, is the shallowest or lowest level of knowledge and understanding.
This can be a devastating hit to the pride of someone who is rooted only in the material realm simply because there is no evidence in that realm of any spiritual realm.
The problem with even a theoretical spirit remains that it will always escape the clutches of the world of matter, proof, senses, mind, reason, words. It will do so simply because, well, it is the spirit. And the spirit cannot be bound by matter. If it could be bound and framed by words or anything else, it would not be a spirit.
It is because of this nature of the spirit and the letter that many seeming violations of the spirit of a law just cannot be proved in courts. I said seeming violations because they remain unproved and, therefore, the subjective interpretation of the party that feels they occurred.
Dynastic rule in political parties is just one such case. There are numerous other important cases. Take the election to the Rajya Sabha of Inder Kumar Gujral from Bihar and Manmohan Singh from Assam. Technically, in purely legal terms restricted to the letter of law, no violation happened in these cases. But those who feel the law was violated may remain unconvinced, simply because for them, the spirit of the law was violated. This kind of violation is difficult, and, in many cases, impossible to establish in a court of law. The currently unsettled cases of Justice Asok Kumar Ganguly and Devyani Khobragade are again in the grey area overlapping letter and spirit.
When a law is being interpreted, the existence of a spirit behind the law brings in scope for any number of interpretations. The words in which the law is framed can have multiple meanings based on subjective views. Hindu mythology has looming instances of the letter and spirit angle. This thing seems to go back in time to the beginning of creation itself.
The intertwining of word and spirit can be seen in the Bible when it says, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Science and its rationalism may not agree with the Bible and say that creation started with a Big Bang.
Ultimately, just like the Word of the Bible, the bang of science is also a sound. All letters are also basically sounds. When they come together in a word, the sounds coalesce to form a meaning. But the letters themselves mean nothing. When something means nothing, it can also mean anything.
Devoid of meaning, it becomes a blank slate to which any meaning, any interpretation can be assigned. That throws words made of letters, and laws made of words, open to all kinds of use and misuse. In my next column, I will come to sublime instances from Hindu mythology where the letter tried to bind a spirit but the spirit remained unbounded.
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