WE THE DISARMED PEOPLE
despite the ever-recurrent demand throughout the
national movement to repeal the Arms Act which the British introduced to disarm
and make impotent our nation, have in our ‘wisdom’ chosen neither to repeal
that Act nor to make the right to bear arms peaceably a fundamental right, as it is in the US Constitution. But that does not in
any way deter the ruling classes, elite groups and criminal coteries to strut
around with the show of all force of arms, so much so that every MLA or MP has
or can become a chota nawab with all his
armed gunmen parading at public expense and the trigger happy police too eager
to fire at unarmed people protesting for various reasons at the least
provocation. Traffic is at the whim and fancy of the so-called law enforcers
diverted/stopped to enable such puny princes ride in joy at the cost of time and
money of millions of people – all this is democracy of course with limited
accountability. A learned person seriously contends on a website that right to
bear arms though not specifically inscribed must be, and even is, read into the
fundamental right to life under Article 21, citing some superior courts’
decisions too in support, but this editor is quite skeptical. When even a
licensed revolver bearing citizen could be arrested/charged for firing joy
bullets into air and the law enables or mandates to do so, and obviously that
even without any harm/injury caused to anybody, and despite the existing customs
in many countries, and even in states (like
Bihar/Punjab) of firing into air on festive/joyous occasions {Swaggering young men
shooting into the sky at weddings is part of the popular culture in rural and
small-town Punjab - Tehelka}, then of what avail can this ‘reading into’ Article
21 be? This is not to lend our unqualified support to joy shooting in air but
only to caution that such things have to be tackled more by persuasion/propaganda
about possible/probable harm and injury to people by falling bullets than to
take to hasty and nasty prosecutions to harass the citizens – that too out of
considerations to irk the opposition parties, etc. More important, paying
homage to Sivasagar (Com. SM recently deceased) and admiring his exquisite line that ‘the revolutionary
arming the people is the poet today’ (Prajalanu
sayudham chese revolutionary nedu kavi),
we take this occasion to suggest that the right to bear arms peaceably needs to
be constitutionally guaranteed, if only to undo the historic injustice
perpetrated against us by the British as also to vindicate the fundamental
rights to life and liberty of the people §§§
