After a patently silly ruling calling for an end to student politics, the Kerala High Court has redeemed itself with an extremely mature judgment on bandhs.

The bandh has become an acceptable form of political protest only because a hapless populace has become inured to its regular use. Rather, misuse, for no political party which owes allegiance to the Constitution can possibly support the paralysis of entire territories as a strategy.

Political parties call bandhs only because they know they can get away with them. Now that their bluff has been called by the courts, for want of a more appropriate authority, and they will be required to foot the bill for all damage to property resulting from a bandh, they will have to find more reasonable forms of protest. Hopefully, the process will be expedited by some enterprising organisation willing to take the court's logic further and claim damages for man-days lost.

The parties of Kerala will no doubt take the matter to the Supreme Court. In that case, the apex court should use the opportunity to broaden the case, clarify the status of bandhs and come up with a law applicable nationwide. Setting aside their inevitability, bandhs enjoy a certain diffuse legitimacy because of association with the trade union movement and the freedom struggle, which have used the refusal to work as a political weapon. Obviously, this legitimacy is enormously suspect. The association with the Independence movement, in particular, is utterly specious. Today's bandhs embody no national or even subnational aspiration. They only embody the politician's power to take his own community hostage. Trade unionism, too, is a totally unrelated issue. A steel worker has the right to close down his own plant. At a stretch, he can ask for the closure of all other steel plants. But his strike cannot be allowed to affect people who are completely unrelated with his trade. He cannot, for instance, stop chemical workers from making an honest living. And he certainly cannot cut off the people's access to basic and essential services, or keep them housebound when they have work to do.

There is no dignity, no reference to a higher purpose, in a bandh. It is a crude display of power street-level power. West Bengal can thank bandh politics for the flight of capital from the state. Once the headquarters for half the capital-intensive industries in India, it has become unattractive even to biscuit manufacturers. Bandhs have caused untold damage in other states too in Bihar and the Northeast in particular. But only in West Bengal has it been institutionalised to the extent that parties can actually compete in bandh terms. In the crudest possible terms, that is: my bandh is bigger than your bandh. Kerala seems to be entering a similar competitive phase. Some of the more successful bandhs this year were sponsored by the BJP, until recently a marginal player in the state. The state would be well advised to nip the problem in the bud right away, before it assumes the proportions of West Bengal's.

Copyright © 1997 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.