<B>By Touria PRAYAG</B>

<I>?No man is above the law and no man is below it; nor do we ask any man?s permission when we ask him to obey it. Obedience to the law is demanded as a right; not asked as a favour.? </I>

<B>Theodore Roosevelt</B>

If a burglar broke into your house, tied your spouse up and started loading your possessions into a bag, no one would expect you to walk in from behind and say: ?May I suggest that behaving in this fashion might not be in your long-term interests?? Attacking, in these circumstances, is called self-defence.

If you held strong views against a particular phenomenon, which you found unjust, and expressed them in the appropriate forum through the right channels, it is called exercising your right to the freedom of speech.

What happened on Friday last is neither of these. We were witness to an incident which, if it goes unchecked, will threaten the very foundations of our civilized society. We saw citizens, in the name of, or hiding behind other citizens, taking the law into their own hands and, until further notice, getting away with it!

Worse, we have witnessed offenders proudly declaring that they have broken the law and threatening to break it again if their demands are not acceded to. That a citizen should publicly declare, « Nous reviendrons demain matin si ça continue», and be allowed to go home and have the possibility to execute his/her threat is awesome. Whether the demands expressed are legitimate or not is neither here nor there. Whether the authorities should have responded sooner, especially that the press had alerted to the problems, is irrelevant to the debate. The act of taking the law into one?s own hands is a crime against public peace. By this conduct, the Candos offenders have offended and endangered the social interest relating to public peace. The worst part of it is that they seem to have been able to enforce their demands with unauthorised means ? something they were apparently unable to do using legal ways.

What worries me tremendously is that something seems to have shifted: many pressure groups from all communities seem to have substituted themselves for our representatives and look happy in their negotiating role on our behalf, « Le Ram Sena de Jugessur était tombé d?accord avec le ministre de la Santé pour que ce soit mardi ; nous, Voice of Hindu, nous ne sommes pas d?accord, cela doit cesser immédiatement». Is it the way their behaviour has been sanctioned by successive governments which has made them forget that the people who were elected by Mauritians of all faiths, including Hindus, to represent them and speak on their behalf are sitting in the Legislative Assembly? Is it the ease with which they get the Ministers? attention and an apparently sympathetic ear which gives them the impression that they have some sort of legitimacy and that they have the right to speak on behalf of some community ? Is it our tendency to ?go along to get along? which is responsible for the situation we are in?

Unlike the Candos offenders, I am a very small person of no distinction whatsoever. Unlike the Candos offenders, I cannot speak on behalf of any section of the community; but the Hindus I know are law-abiding tax-paying citizens who have always shown a great deal of respect for their co citizens. Most of them have always acted with deference and esteem, even awe for the law, and have a sense that the law has value over and above the immediacy of its strict application in a given situation. Like most decent citizens, they have a sense of how their conduct impacts on the totality of society. They are aware that the law does not exist just for everyone else to respect. I doubt that they would endorse a behaviour which does not show even minimum compliance with the law!

Mauritians have struggled for over 40 years to create a nation governed by the rule of law, not the rule based on the whims of individuals, whether such individuals be kings, presidents or anyone else.

Let the rule of law then be the only law!