Lawyers and their trials

It was a routine day in the Supreme Court of India for me as a law intern. As I was trying to find the court room to which I had been allotted, there was a little commotion outside Room No. 1, which is the Chief Justice’s court. Another intern who was rushing past said there was someone from Naxalbari, the village known as the birthplace of naxalism and for its sheer poverty, crying out for the Chief Justice’s intervention in his plea.

To me it brought a sense of excitement, and soon I was in that court room. It was an opportunity to witness a party-in-person arguing his own case. An intern has to learn as much as possible from such situations; they help you learn the procedures. I could see the judges discussing the matter among themselves, lawyers talking about such frequent interventions these days, and interns turning the pages of their bare act volumes to spot the provision on jurisdiction.

The case was not admitted for want of jurisdiction and procedural discrepancies. I was there as the person informed fellow-villagers waiting outside about the failure of their move, and could see tears in their eyes. Strangely, I was hardly moved by the suffering of the villagers that they had sought to highlight before the highest court of the land. Rather, I went about my business as if nothing had happened.

Almost a year later we read the news regarding frequent deaths due to chronic hunger in Naxalbari, in The Hindu (‘Hunger rampant at Naxal birth place’, August 23, 2014). We then started discussing the flawed implementation of policies that had resulted in such a catastrophe. Even at that point, not once did we talk about the families of those who had died. We were more interested in enhancing our resume by writing research papers on the competing arguments of rampant hunger, government policies and the legal provisions of the Food Security Act.

Later that evening I realised that five years of learning law had made us professionals seeking to enhance our scholastic knowledge and experience to gain placements in top-notch law firms. But we had become bereft of emotions.

I still remember the first day in law college. I had a deep sense of understanding about the suffering of the people, I was conscious of the distress many people faced in their day-to-day life. But that was a long time ago. At the end of the first year, we were chatting happily, flirting with classmates, or playing tic-toc when the professor was trying to give us insights into societal suffering.

Over the next four years we were transformed from teenagers to budding lawyers. As the years passed, we could ourselves feel the loss of humanness in us. Now we hardly reacted to scenes of discrimination or marginalisation. We didn’t hear the cry of people as we passed by them. It was only the practical aspects for us, for we get paid for our words and actions.

When the World Health Organization says 40 per cent of those in the Naxalbari community has a body mass index of less than 18.5, and that the community should be regarded to be in a state of famine, we hardly reacted, we were engrossed in our own routine work.

Lost emotions

An act of discrimination or people’s sufferings is seen as an opportunity to write research papers which can win us accolades later. Gradually, we have made ourselves humans without emotions. As we learn to act in empathy with the client, we are left with no empathy towards society at large.

There was a time when lawyers were seen as messiahs against injustice. It was the time of Gandhi, Nehru, and Ambedkar. Lawyers then worked for the emancipation of the deprived.

But all that was a long time ago. Now we have to take educational loans, grapple with careers and earn enough, and the competition in the field is serious.

No wonder, then, that I feel a victim too of loss of humanness. It is time we started restoring respect for society. It is not a call to take up cudgels against anyone. Instead, with deep-rooted sense of commitment, we need to embark on a journey of socially engineering. It’s time we recognised that we are social engineers.

animesh.tripathi28@gmail.com