Wednesday 28 December 2022

Family Support or Social Policing?

Wealthy or powerful people shielding their kith & kin even if they break the law of the land is quite common. This gradually erodes the people's trust in the law enforcing machinery.

This has been prevalent since the time of Mahabharata, where turning the blind eye towards their erring offspring (literally!) by Dhritarashtra & Gandhari, led to the decimation of the Kaurava dynasty.

However, it was also quite common to endorse "social policing" in the first part of the twentieth century, as recollected by the well-known actor & playwright, Master Hirannaiah. He had said if misdeeds of children were reported to their parents, they would happily endorse the complainants to suitably punish them themselves!

Another variant of "social policing" is the "vigilante" system, where people take the law into their own hands, when the justice machinery is ineffective. The classic instance is the "Four Just Men" series of novels by the popular mystery writer of the early twentieth century, Edgar Wallace.

Two extreme cases of this "social policing" are shown firstly in the popular film "Mother India" (where an upright mother shoots dead her own incorrigibly evil son) & secondly in Agatha Christie's Poirot story "The Chocolate Box", where a similarly upright mother poisons to death her own son, realising his demonic nature.

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