The Hindu Business Line : Thoughtless excess

IN HIS novel Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens made Mr Bumble say "Law is a' ass" (invariably misquoted as "an ass"). At the hands of those enforcing it, law often becomes more of a' ass, violating human rights with impunity and causing needless suffering, harassment and humiliation.

The arrest and jailing of the CEO of bazee.com and the managing director of the governing board of an educational institution for the suicide of a student in the hostel because of ragging fall within this category.

At this rate, a Chief Secretary may have to be arrested for the fatalities caused by the collapse of a collectorate building somewhere, a Director General of Police for custodial death in some thana, and the Railway Minister, Mr Lalu Prasad, himself for the recent head-on collision of two trains which he himself described as a "brutal murder".

It is obvious that even to think on those lines would be preposterous. And yet, simply because one of the many thousands of items in an electronic auction portal happens to be a pornographic clip put in there by a misguided youth, or a student in severe mental stress commits suicide, the top executives are arrested and remanded.

Such an overzealous misapplication of law can arise only from the inability to distinguish between functional responsibility and personal culpability.

Functional responsibility itself is of three kinds: The first is direct, immediate and proximate responsibility for commissions and omissions evident from job description or division of work; the second is what is derived from a specified supervisory role, as in the case, say, of a superintending engineer required to check the designs of a bridge and supervise its construction and thereby becomes responsible for faulty construction equally with those below him; and the third is moral responsibility as in the case of a head of an organisation for the occurrence of a mishap or malfeasance.

The last may be regrettable but should not automatically lead to any assumption of criminal liability.

For that presumption to be drawn, there should be wanton and patent personal culpability. To make an assault on individual liberty where such culpability is absent is a travesty of rule of law.

Provisions of existing laws in which the drawing of the line between responsibility and culpability has been left vague or ambiguous require immediate amendment.

B. S. Raghavan

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