New Delhi, Nov 25: It took a long time coming and it delivers more questions than answers. In its most straightforward reading, the Supreme Court’s verdict in the Tansi land scam case — more than a year after it was reserved by the bench on September 26 last year — exonerates J. Jayalalithaa. But even as it acquits her of any legal wrongdoing, it insistently keeps the Tamil Nadu chief minister in the dock. She must still ‘‘atone’’, she must yet answer her ‘‘conscience’’. For, so what if she is declared not guilty of violating the law — she has breached the ‘‘spirit’’ of the wholly voluntary Code of Conduct adopted by her state. Long after the sounds of celebration have died at Poes Garden, the vexed questions unleashed by the apex court’s judgment are likely to resonate: How much, and in what proportion, is justice made up of both — its legal aspect and the moral one? Is it possible to draw a tidy dividing line between the two? But won’t the attempt to do so diminish the quality of justice? Surely, any amputation of the one from the other will be too bloodless to be true?
So is Jayalalithaa finally free of her Tansi taint? Now that the case that spectacularly disqualified her from chief ministership once and could have potentially unseated her from her throne is over, can she rule her state with even greater assertion? Yes, if we read justice as that narrowly legal thing; not really, if justice is to be located in a larger moral universe. But as the clearly agonised apex court itself suggests in its judgment, in many ways this is a crude and a cruel choice, one that citizens of a living democracy must never be asked to make. In a democracy, the letter of the law must meld discreetly and seamlessly with the spirit of voluntary codes of conduct. We shouldn’t either convict our leaders only on bald technicalities, or have to watch them get acquitted on technical pleas alone.
The Supreme Court’s Tansi judgment, in the final instance, points to a glaring lacuna in the way in which the issue of corruption has been framed in public discussion so far. If corruption is seen only as the formal violation of the law, then the acquittal by law, howsoever constricted its letter, must be seen as the final exoneration. But if we are to hold our leaders to standards that are larger and higher, even if less tangible, then a redefinition is required. The Tansi verdict challenges us to work out the new criteria and to hold our leaders to them.