Relevance: GS Paper 2 (Polity)
Source:
Why has this issue cropped up?
Recently, the Delhi High court quashed those provisions of the Bombay Prevention of Begging Act (BPBA), 1959, that make begging a punishable offence. However, its ruling is applicable only to Delhi.
Bombay Prevention of Begging Act (BPBA)
The Bombay Prevention of Begging Act (BPBA), 1959, which has held sway for decades, rests on the premise that poverty equals criminality.
Cons of the BPBA Act
- This allows the state to arrest people without a warrant on nothing more than a “suspicion,” and put them out of the public gaze.
- Invariably, police raids to round up “beggars” and force them out of city limits are part of projects to “clean up” cities.
- India’s image, especially for the foreigner’s gaze, takes precedence over the plight of the banished.
- The people targeted by the anti-begging laws are not in anyone’s “constituency” given their social and economic deprivation.
- Under the act, beggars, peddlers, small-time hawkers, street performers, ragpickers, and “loiterers” (including migrants), can be arrested without a warrant or let off on a bond or detained in a certified institution for two to three years and, on a second conviction, for 10 years.
- Effectively, this posits the beggar as a legal outsider: inhabiting the same territorial space that is India, but disenfranchised from the benefits of Indian citizenship that guarantees constitutional rights.
- Implied in this is the state’s stance that the rights that come with citizenship have to be bought with forms of privilege that lend a perception of legitimacy and “respectability” to the individual.
- Legal due process is hardly ever followed by the magistrate courts, which send those arrested to beggar homes after conviction. It is enough for a person to “look like a beggar” in order to be arrested.
- The beggar homes are understaffed and face a severe paucity of resources; and the inmates are treated like free labour.
- Theoretically, the inmates are supposed to receive vocational training, but practically they come back to the same desperate situation.
- In these raids, even those not begging but found in dirty clothes and wandering were arrested arbitrarily. Transgender persons, for example, are particularly vulnerable.
- Such a vast amount of unchecked power over certain sections of the marginalised population by means of this law gives the state machinery yet another tool to perpetuate entrenched societal biases against already vulnerable groups.
- It must be noted here that the criminal begging ring racketeers are hardly the ones who are arrested in the raids. While these persons invariably escape the law, the sentence they receive upon conviction (if at all) is three years.
Argument given by the the Delhi High Court
- The Delhi High Court argued that it is unfair of the state to add insult to injury and punish people for its own failures.
- The Delhi High Court pointed out the difference between duress (forced by a criminal gang to beg) and necessity (forced to beg due to poverty, hunger and lack of legitimate choices).
- It also made what is now a historical observation: “They beg to survive, to remain alive. For any civilised society to have persons belonging to this category is a disgrace and a failure of the State. To subject them to further ignominy and deprivation by ordering their detention in a certified institution is nothing short of dehumanising them.”
Pros of the the Delhi High Court order
- The recent ruling by the Delhi High Court has maintained the provisions in the act that penalise those employing or causing persons to solicit or receive alms.
- It has also called upon the city administration to curb any racket of forced begging after examining the sociological and economic aspects of the matter.
- It has been proved that the provisions of the act go against Articles 19(1)(a) and 21 of the Constitution and the state’s duty to promote the welfare of the disabled and unemployed.
Conclusion
Destitution is widely considered to be a product of the processes of a country’s political economy. In the absence of immediate structural improvement, the least the state governments in India can do is decriminalise begging. The Delhi High Court’s judgment accepts that there is a problem. The solution is staring us in the face.
