By-Dr Srabani Basu
Associate Professor, Department of Literature and Languages, SRM University AP
Justice is supposed to be blind. Somewhere along the way, it seems to have also become remarkably indiscriminate.
Last week, my son returned from school quieter than usual.After a little persuasion, he finally told me that the swimming instructor had scolded him for not bringing his swimming costume.Like most parents, my first instinct was to wonder whether I had forgotten something. As it turned out, I had.
Until last year, swimming had been one among several outdoor activities that students could choose. This year, the school made it compulsory. Somewhere between the daily avalanche of WhatsApp messages which range from fee reminders, event notifications, competition registrations, transport updates, holiday circulars and enough digital communication to qualify as a second full-time job, I had missed the message announcing the change.
Fair enough.Parents are human.We forget.We overlook things.What intrigued me, however, was not my oversight.It was the school’s response.
Nobody called to say, “Your child has forgotten to bring his swimming costume.”
Nobody sent a reminder requesting that it be packed on swimming days.
The adults who could have solved the problem with a thirty-second phone call never communicated with one another.
Instead, the only person who had absolutely no control over the situation was reprimanded.My son.As I listened to him narrate the incident, a thought that has quietly accompanied me since childhood resurfaced.
Why do we humans have such peculiar logic when it comes to punishment?
For as long as I can remember, we have displayed an extraordinary talent for punishing the person who is easiest to reach rather than the person who is actually responsible.
School offered my first lessons in this fascinating philosophy.
One student whispered.Forty students stood outside the classroom.One child launched a paper aeroplane with the precision of an aerospace engineer.The entire class lost recess.
Apparently, justice travelled in bulk.As children, we accepted it because we had little choice.As adults, we assume the world has become more rational.
It hasn’t.
It has merely acquired PowerPoint presentations, compliance manuals and Standard Operating Procedures.Take the workplace.One employee clicks on a suspicious email.The following Monday, everyone attends mandatory cybersecurity training.One person submits fraudulent travel bills.Suddenly reimbursement requires enough documentation to prove you personally discovered the destination.
One employee abuses flexible working hours.The organisation responds by distrusting everyone equally.The culprit eventually leaves.The rule stays forever.
If archaeologists of the future excavate our offices, they may conclude that civilisation worshipped paperwork.The most remarkable part is that we rarely question this logic.
Instead, we dignify it with impressive vocabulary: Policy.Protocol.Compliance.Governance.
Sometimes these measures are necessary. Institutions do have a legitimate responsibility to reduce future risks. But there is a subtle difference between preventing future mistakes and punishing innocent people because preventing future mistakes is administratively easier than identifying individual responsibility.
Perhaps this tendency reveals something about the human mind itself.The brain dislikes ambiguity and it is an energy efficient machine. It looks for quick solutions. Finding the real cause requires investigation.Understanding context demands patience.Differentiating between accident, negligence and intention consumes time and mental energy.Collective punishment, by contrast, is beautifully efficient.
It requires almost no thinking at all.Convenience arrives dressed as justice.And because both wear similar clothes, we often fail to notice the substitution.
History has repeated this pattern endlessly.One financial scandal gives birth to regulations that affect millions who did nothing wrong.One security breach persuades everyone to surrender a little more privacy.One airline passenger behaves spectacularly badly and suddenly the rest of us are removing belts, shoes, laptops, water bottles and occasionally our dignity before boarding a flight.
Every rule once had a perfectly reasonable beginning.Its immortality is another matter altogether.
Families are no different.One sibling breaks trust.Every sibling inherits stricter rules.A parent makes poor financial decisions.Children often inherit consequences they neither created nor deserved.
Sometimes the punishment is material.Sometimes it is emotional.Sometimes it arrives quietly as inherited shame.
What fascinates me most is that we carry this habit into our private lives as well.One friendship betrays us.We conclude that people cannot be trusted.One relationship ends painfully.Love itself is sentenced to life imprisonment.One manager humiliates us.Every future boss becomes suspect.
The punishment is no longer institutional.It has migrated into the architecture of our own minds.Psychologists have long recognised that the human brain is a magnificent machine for pattern recognition. However, its greatest strength is also one of its greatest weaknesses.It generalises, predicts, simplifies.These shortcuts help us survive.
Unfortunately, they do not always help us remain fair.Perhaps that explains why civilisation repeatedly confuses justice with convenience.Justice is painstaking.It asks difficult questions.Who actually made the decision?Who had the authority?Who possessed the information?Who could reasonably have prevented the outcome?
Convenience asks only one question:Who is available to punish?The answers are rarely the same.
William Blake wrote, “One Law for the Lion and Ox is Oppression.” Equal treatment is not always just treatment. A single rule applied indiscriminately may create the comforting illusion of fairness while quietly ignoring the rich complexity of human circumstances. We mistake the map for the territory.
The irony, of course, is delicious.We tell children to think independently.We tell employees to take ownership.We celebrate individuality.Yet the moment something goes wrong, individuality disappears.Everyone becomes “all of you.”
Responsibility is individual only when success is being celebrated.Failure, it seems, prefers company.Perhaps that is why my son’s story stayed with me long after the swimming costume had been found and packed away.It was never really about swimming.It was about something much larger.
It was about a habit of mind that quietly permeates classrooms, boardrooms, families and societies. It is a habit that often chooses the easiest recipient of punishment rather than the rightful bearer of responsibility.
The measure of a civilised society is not merely how effectively it disciplines wrongdoing.It is how carefully it distinguishes between the guilty and the innocent.Justice does not become fair simply because it is efficient.
And perhaps the next time something goes wrongin a classroom, an office, a family or even in our own relationships, it may be worth pausing before asking, “Who should be punished?”
A more important question might be:
Who, in all fairness, could actually have done something differently?
Perhaps the real purpose of punishment should never have been to make someone suffer. It should have been to help the right person become more responsible. The moment punishment lands on the wrong shoulders; it ceases to educate. It merely intimidates.
Civilisations are not judged by how efficiently they punish. They are judged by how accurately they locate responsibility because responsibility cannot be outsourced. Neither should punishment.
