The FIR against a Mansa advocate raises a question larger than one case: can a statutory commission invoke the SC/ST Act on the strength of two Punjabi insults, and who holds it to account when it gets the law wrong?
Dr Sandeep Ghand
The Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act exists because caste-based humiliation is real, pervasive and historically unpunished. Any argument about its application must begin from that fact. But a law written to protect the dignity of the most marginalised does not become stronger when it is stretched to cover conduct it was never meant to reach. It becomes weaker, and so does the institution that stretches it.
That is the concern now animating the legal fraternity in Mansa, and it deserves a hearing well beyond the district.
The facts, as the District Bar Association has laid them out, are narrow. Advocate Amrinder Singh Mann did not write the Facebook post at the centre of the controversy. He commented on a post written by someone else. His comment named no caste and used no caste-related expression. It used two words, “dramebaaz” and “anpadh”, in reply to the original post. On that basis, the Punjab State Scheduled Castes Commission reportedly took suo motu cognizance and directed the Senior Superintendent of Police, Mansa, to register a case under the SC/ST Act.
Let us be plain about those two words. Calling someone a drama merchant or an illiterate is rude. In a personal or political exchange it may be objectionable and discourteous. Nobody on the Bar is claiming it was gracious. The question is whether it was a crime under a statute that carries serious consequences, including restrictions on anticipatory bail. That question cannot be answered by the fact that the person criticised belongs to a Scheduled Caste. It can only be answered by examining whether the essential ingredients of the offence are present: whether the words were spoken with intent to humiliate on the ground of caste, and whether that intent is borne out by the words themselves and their context.
The Bar Association’s position, stated by its President Gurdas Singh Mann and Secretary Maninder Singh Sidhu, is that this examination never happened. The Commission’s direction, they say, treated political criticism of a public office-holder as a caste offence without testing it against the statute. If that is what occurred, it is not a technicality. It is the substitution of identity for evidence.
Here the issue moves from one advocate to the architecture of accountability itself. A commission constituted to protect Scheduled Castes carries considerable power. It can summon, inquire and direct. Those powers are justified by the gravity of the harm they are meant to address. But the greater the power vested in a constitutional or statutory body, the heavier its obligation to exercise that power objectively, on verified facts, within the limits of its mandate and free of political or institutional pressure. A commission that directs FIRs first and examines ingredients later is not protecting anyone. It is lending its authority to whoever reaches it first.
The damage from such a lapse falls in two directions. The immediate victim is the person wrongly charged, who must now defend himself against a serious criminal allegation. The longer-term victim is the Act itself. Every case in which the SC/ST Act is seen to have been invoked without foundation hands ammunition to those who would like to see the law diluted or repealed. The people who pay for that are not advocates in Mansa. They are the Dalit families for whom this law remains the only instrument of redress against genuine atrocity. Careless use of a protective law is, in the end, an attack on the people it protects.
The response from the Mansa Bar has been measured in its demands. It observed a work-stoppage on September 4 and has called for a Punjab-wide boycott of courts on September 7. It has taken care to say, repeatedly, that the protest is not against any caste or community, and that if Advocate Mann has committed an offence, the law should take its course through a fair investigation. Its demand is for something the Commission should have wanted too: an impartial, independent inquiry into how this case came to be registered.
That demand should be met, and the inquiry should ask two questions with equal seriousness. Did the advocate’s comment satisfy the ingredients of the offence? And did the Commission, in taking cognizance and issuing its direction, act within the law? If the answer to the first is yes, the prosecution should proceed. If the answer to the second is no, the officials responsible should face the same scrutiny they imposed on a citizen. No person is above the law. Neither is any institution.
Constitutional and statutory bodies were created to strengthen the rule of law and social justice, not to deepen the divisions of caste, class and party that already run through Punjab’s public life. The test of whether the SC Commission serves that purpose is not how quickly it can direct an FIR. It is whether it can be trusted to get the law right.
(Dr Sandeep Ghand writes on law, public institutions and politics in Punjab.)
