The Hindu Business Line : `When liberty becomes licence, dictatorship is near'

NARAIN Karthikeyan, ``the fastest Indian on wheels'' did a 300 km testing-run in Silverstone to complete the distance rookies need to earn a Formula One `super licence'. Elsewhere in the UK, Professor Ian Wilmut, the doc who created Dolly, is now on a different track; with a licence from Britain's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, he will be cloning human embryos to harvest stem cells.

The US is busy with the Real ID Act, aiming at tougher rules to confirm identity before temporary driver's licences are issued. And, in Delhi, Reliance Infocomm has been arguing that it has "neither violated any licence conditions nor masqueraded international calls as domestic calls," though Mr Dayanidhi Maran seems to have a different view.

There are enough licences to come to terms with, but what's a licence? Concise Oxford English Dictionary has a place for the word, just after lice, and explains it as "a permit from an authority to own or use something, do a particular thing, or carry on trade.) Thus, it is a formal permission. King Henry IV permits thus: "My Lord Northumberland, we licence your departure with your son." Sir Toby Belch gives his okay in Twelfth Night: "Taunt him with the licence of ink... and as many lies as will lie in thy sheet of paper, although the sheet were big enough for the bed of Ware in England." In King Henry VI, Dick, `the butcher of Ashford' gets "a licence to kill for a hundred lacking one". What a licence to violence!

License is usually the verb, to grant a licence to or authorise, though the US spells it thus for noun too. "When a licensee has a licence, they are licensed by a Licensing Authority," is some guidance from Wikipedia. In Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913), licence is explained as "a formal permission from the proper authorities to perform certain acts or to carry on a certain business, which without such permission would be illegal; a grant of permission; as, a license to preach, to practice medicine, to sell gunpowder or intoxicating liquors."

On permission requests from literature, easy to spot is Hamlet, where you hear Prince Fortinbras directing his captain to go and greet the Danish king, and to "Tell him that, by his licence, Fortinbras craves the conveyance of a promised march over his kingdom." Montjoy places a miserable appeal before King Henry V: "I come to thee for charitable licence, that we may wander o'er this bloody field to look our dead, and then to bury them."

Cyber fields can equally be bloody because there are end user licence agreements or EULA, at times nebulously drafted to trap the user with extra restrictions besides the copyright. If you think licence limits freedom, there is another meaning to licence that may help: "freedom to behave without restraint." In Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, you hear Mark Antony's relaxation: "Taunt my faults with such full licence as both truth and malice have power to utter." There is a danger that licence borders on irresponsibility. Which is why Isabella would chide in Measure For Measure: "I know your virtue hath a licence in't, which seems a little fouler than it is, to pluck on others." Elsewhere in the same play you hear, "That fellow is a fellow of much licence." King Henry V would talk of "barbarous licence" since "men are merriest when they are from home".

And the Bard pens a question in As You Like It: "And all the embossed sores and headed evils, that thou with licence of free foot hast caught, wouldst thou disgorge into the general world." Licentious used to mean disregarding accepted rules. Not what James Wilson would approve of when saying, "Without liberty, law loses its nature and its name, and becomes oppression. Without law, liberty also loses its nature and name, and becomes licentiousness." Now, licentiousness means promiscuity in sexual matters.

"When liberty becomes licence, dictatorship is near," cautions Will Durant, and we may check if that applies to Nepal. Edmund Burke must have had a bad brush with the media when he said, "the intolerable license with which the newspapers break...the rules of decorum." In Licence to Kill, Sanchez tells an `unemployed' Bond, "It's very difficult to obtain a work permit here in Isthmus." A better job description for 007 is how Q puts it to Bond, showing the new BMW in Tomorrow Never Dies: "You have a licence to kill — not break the traffic laws!" While on the subject of cars, getting a driver's licence is a sign of success when you're 16, and if you manage to keep it when running 70, there's good reason to celebrate.

John Milton lays down criteria for licensing: "License they mean when they cry liberty; for who loves that, must first be wise and good." For, "None can love freedom but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license, which never hath more scope than under tyrants." Ayn Rand too imposes conditions: "Let them check their standards of value. Let them check — before they grant themselves the unspeakable license of evil-as-necessity — whether they know what is the good and what are the conditions it requires."

Licence is "a document, plate, or tag evidencing a licence granted," says Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. For the writer or artist, `poetic' licence is "deviation from fact, form, or rule" to make the story they're telling more interesting or effective. "The freedom of poetic license," is a Cicero line. Off-licence is a shop that sells mainly alcoholic drinks to be taken away and drunk at home, a UK usage, explains Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary; in the US, such shops are liquor stores. With provisional licence you can sport your `L' board. It may be futile to look for a licence to print money, but when a company or activity is ``a licence to print money'' it can make people "become very rich without having to make any effort". A caution, that is, for rich fathers-in-law in the making.

Online Etymology Dictionary traces licence to 1362: "From Old French licence, from Latin licentia `freedom, liberty, license,' from licentem (nom. licens)." Root is Latin licere meaning `to be allowed, be lawful'. Licit, elicit and illicit too have their origins in licere. To make the lingo hunt pleasurable, leisure too has a claim to be related with licere, I learn; so also, viz or videlicet is from videre `to see' and licet `it is allowed', as www.etymonline.com informs.

A search for the origin of licences can take you to the middle of Saxony in Germany, to the Ore Mountains where a little village called Grossolbersdorf is located, to "a one-of-a-kind museum for license plates, traffic und registration history", as www.nummernschildmuseum.de informs. Permits and licences have been with us for ages, and you can trace licence in New Testament: "And when he had given him licence, Paul stood on the stairs, and beckoned with the hand unto the people." And, in a different chapter, "It is not the manner of the Romans to deliver any man to die, before that he which is accused have the accusers face to face, and have licence to answer for himself concerning the crime laid against him."

And isn't that what the TDSAT or the Telecom Dispute Settlement Appellate Tribunal is doing by getting the accused and the accusers present their views and have licence to answer `concerning the crime laid against'?

ComingToTerms@TheHindu.co.in

D. Murali

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