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| Sunanda K Datta-Ray: It's payback time | | Fines don?t bother the rich, community service may just do the trick |
| Sunanda K Datta-Ray / New Delhi Nov 21, 2009, 00:08 IST |
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Londoners were regaled recently with the spectacle of their former deputy mayor cleaning out a public lavatory wearing a bright fluorescent orange jacket emblazoned with the words “Community Payback”. It must have been even more exciting for viewers than Marie Antoinette in the tumbril on her way to the guillotine for it was not the end of the road for Ian Clement. He will soon return from the lavatory to face the music of daily life, when some of the real fun might start.
Clement might owe his “community payback” sentence to Lee Kuan Yew’s legal ingenuity. Finding that rich Singaporeans just shrugged off fines for offences for which they couldn’t be jailed or caned, Lee issued the Corrective Work Order. Someone who litters park or pavement, for instance, must spend a certain number of days picking up cigarette butts. Other countries have instititutionalised Lee’s idea.
Down the ages, the link between crime and punishment has bothered many, besides Dostoevsky. The other day I came upon a facsimile pamphlet titled “Hanging is not enough for Murtherers, High-way men and House-breakers” submitted to both the British Houses of Parliament in 1701. Unfortunately, neither the typeface nor the convoluted language encouraged wading through the text, but I can understand the sentiment for death ends it all, leaving no scope for remorse or reparation. And the lethal injection administered nowadays in American prisons makes death painless too.
Hanging, drawing and quartering, common up to the 18th century, seems as brutal today as the pike on which Indian kings impaled captured foes. But a shopkeeper in Dulwich — Margaret Thatcher’s constituency — from whom I once bought a Yale door lock murmured, “Yes, necessary nowadays, given the rise in break-ins. They’ve got the right idea where you come from! Chop off their hands, I say!” Obviously, the shopkeeper took me for a Pakistani.
Many still remember the impact of Nehru’s outraged exclamation that blackmarketeers should be hanged from the nearest lamp post. But no one was hanged. Instead, hoarders and blackmarketeers rose high in society, lionised by everyone and buying their way into positions of power and influence. As the old Yorkshire saying has it, the colour of one’s brass doesn’t matter. It’s having it that does. True the world over, it becomes noticeable in India only because we make such a song and dance of morality.
Nehru may have meant what he said but his daughter must have had her tongue firmly in her cheek when recommending a social boycott of people with black money. The discerning noted that she specified social, not political or financial. However intensely Indira Gandhi may have disapproved of black money, she didn’t want the punishment to fall on her party, which it would have done if funding dried up.
But what was the saintly VP Singh up to when suggesting that those who had salted illicit hoards in numbered Swiss accounts should suffer the punishment of being forced into exile. Surely even “Mr Clean” knew that life in Switzerland would be paradise gained for most Indians? But “Mr Clean” was also “Mr Cunning”. Exile was only a ploy to get rid of his boss for whose job he hankered and whom he had taken great care to tarnish with the Bofors brush.
Clement’s ordeal is quite straightforward by comparison. He would still have been lording it as deputy mayor on a £127,000 salary, whizzing round the world business class to promote the 2012 Olympics, if he hadn’t been caught out and convicted on five fraud charges, including dining and wining his girlfriend and having his private Jaguar repaired at public cost. Many say the sum involved — a little over £7,000 — was peanuts compared to what British parliamentarians get away with. But he had “flagrantly and arrogantly” betrayed the trust reposed in him, thundered the judge sentencing Clement to 12 weeks’ jail suspended for 18 months, 100 hours of community work, a £1,000 fine and a stern order not to stir out of his home between 9 pm and 6 am.
Could there be a subjective element in this sentence? While mayor Boris Johnson is a Eton and Oxford grandee, his deputy used to be a labourer. A West Bengal advocate-general once explained that while the law was immutable, his job was to interpret it in terms of Marxist ideology. Significantly, both he and the chief minister who had appointed him were London-trained barristers. They knew that the punishment must fit not only the crime but also the person. It’s called class justice.
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