Two Wounded Strongmen and the Trouble With Proving Your Own Innocence

The Forms No Law Required

Imagine you are the Superintendent of Police for a district in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region. For three Sundays running, a Christian congregation in your jurisdiction has had its prayer meeting disrupted by a group of men loosely affiliated with a Hindu nationalist youth organisation, who arrive uninvited, film the worshippers and question them about why they are there.

No law has been broken by the congregation. No FIR has been filed against the disruptors that has gone anywhere. This Sunday, the church's own pastor tells you they have started asking every worshipper to sign a form declaring that their attendance is voluntary - a document with no legal force, designed purely to have something to show the next time men walk in filming.

You could read this as a private, sensible precaution and leave it alone. Or you could read it for what it actually is: citizens manufacturing proof of their own innocence because the state that owes them protection under Article 25 has, in practice, stopped offering it.

The question in front of you is not abstract. Do you deploy your force pre-emptively to protect the congregation's right to worship without interference - a decision that will be read, correctly, as taking a side in a politically charged dispute your superiors would rather you stayed out of - or do you let the informal equilibrium continue, in which citizens police their own compliance so the state doesn't have to choose a side at all? Why this is not an easy call The instinct is to say: of course you protect the congregation, that's the job.

But consider what protecting them actually costs. Pre-emptive deployment against a group with the kind of informal political patronage the Bajrang Dal often enjoys in such contexts is not a neutral administrative act in the eyes of your own department - it is a decision your superiors may read as picking a fight they specifically did not authorise, at a moment when the political incentive runs the other way: demonstrating "toughness" on cultural flashpoints is, as Pratap Bhanu Mehta's recent analysis of "wounded strongmen" argues, precisely the kind of substitute for competence that leaders reach for when their broader legitimacy is fading.

You could find your own career quietly punished for doing your actual job. Inaction, meanwhile, costs something just as real and more silent: it teaches every congregation and every group that isn't a congregation, that the state's neutrality is negotiable if you can generate enough street pressure. Constitutional morality as the tie-breaker This is where the framework has to do real work, not decorate a foregone conclusion.

Constitutional morality - the principle that public officials owe their conduct to the Constitution's values, not to the political currents of the moment - says that Article 25's guarantee does not become optional when enforcing it is politically inconvenient.

The resolution is to deploy protection actively, treat the disruptions as the law-and-order matter they are and accept the professional cost of doing so honestly rather than quietly. That cost is real: a transfer, a black mark, perhaps worse.

But the alternative - letting citizens draft their own proof of innocence because officials found neutrality too expensive to defend - is not a smaller cost. It is the same cost, paid by someone with far less power to absorb it.