The Central (Absolute) Exemptions Act, 2011, came into force today (November 9, 2011). Since it exempts everyone from everything it was greeted with joyous, if confused and occasionally impunibly bloody, celebrations throughout the country, headscratching by governments abroad, and frantic scrambling for inclusion—or, rather, exclusion (from law and ethics)—by corporate entities with interests in India.

On the face of it, the Act is a prodigious traffic jam of affirmative (in)action: for instance, it mandates both exemption from reservations and exemption from merit; the Act makes the individual responsible—and simultaneously and without prejudice exempts him from the responsibility of being responsible—for choosing which side to be on and on which day or hour (any less, sociologists say, would reduce the Act to a farce), and to provide himself with a satisfactory rationale for his choice – or not.

Scattered groups of civil society protesters that professed to have seen anarchy whooping it up between the lines of the Act were firmly informed that absolutely every single word was entirely exempt from negotiability, and that they should be glad that the Act exempted them from punishment for badmouthing what parliamentarians have been extolling as the “Motherlode of Munificence”, the “Right to Rights”.

But the protesters successfully pushed for the insertion of a chapter positing—though not, in so many words, permitting—exemptions from exemptions, which a spokesperson referred to as “an ethical loophole, an escape route from a madhouse”. The details of this chapter were debated—mainly for form’s sake and because filibustering is a difficult habit to cure—by a parliamentary committee which was exempted from having to adhere to either a deadline or a decision. Since the Act had itself been exempted from the imperatives of due process, it was passed without vote by majority validation, and with the chapter on exemption from exemptions hanging out like a churidar’s cord at a formal, starched-khadi political bash.

CHAPTER I

PRELIMINARY

1. This Act may be called the Central (Absolute) Exemptions Act, 2011 and nothing else, whatever the political dispensation and system of governance. It is exempted from amendment as long as this democracy shall prevail.

2. The Act is exempted from any need to demonstrate its seriousness of intent and/or design above and beyond the very fact of its existence. Its mere existence supersedes all other legislations related to affirmative action and replaces them with affirmative inaction.

3. “Absolute” means “everything and everyone, bar none”, including non-citizens awaiting citizenship, citizens who have applied for ration cards and voting cards and come under the ambit of the proposed Multipurpose UID cards, even in cases where eligibility for the same is contested.
“Absolute” encompasses women, men, children and transgenders of all sub-castes, sub-sub-castes, sub-sub-sub-castes (and any more “subs” the government may see fit to introduce, carve out from existing castes or create, even from nothing seen, heard, smelt, tasted, felt, imagined or hallucinated, from time to time – Please see ‘Atomised Nation: How to Break Societies Without Breaking a Sweat’, Chapter V, Miscellaneous);
all religions and their castes and sub-castes, etc, even where none originally existed and were fabricated, employing pleas, agitations, extortion, payoffs or assurances of electoral loyalty, for the sole purpose of availing of earlier exemptions in the forms of reservations, subsidies and unconditional governmental largesse and endowments (please see ‘Making Irresponsibility Work for Us: Money for Nothing’, Chapter V, Miscellaneous);

all socioeconomic strata, rich, poor, opportunistically backward, from those picking sustenance from landfills, to seven-star gourmands, to (illegalised) nightsoil carriers, to body organ buyers with offshore accounts (please refer to ‘Explaining the Hierarchy of Riches in India: The Enigma of the Recurrently Toppling Inverted Pyramid’, Chapter V, Miscellaneous); 

all age groups, from the immediately post-natal to the near-death elderly (please refer to ‘Staying Alive, Staying Alive: Leveraging the Mortal Fear of Government’, Chapter V, Miscellaneous);

all colours, from waxen to near-black (please refer to the Pantone list of colours; swatches were painstakingly and not always satisfactorily matched with human skin; the process has been detailed in Chapter V, Miscellaneous);

all heights (please refer to ‘Should Height Be Inclusive of Insole or Just Sole?’ and ‘Problems of Measuring Height with Reference to Bollywood Filmstars: Dealing with Tantrums’, Chapter V, Miscellaneous);

all shapes and sizes (please refer to ‘Indian Phenotypes: The Dangers of the Bureaucratic Belly’, Chapter V, Miscellaneous);

all mental conditions, from those considered normative, to the housebound intellectually-challenged, to the homeless intellectually-challenged, to the institutionalised, about-to-be-institutionalised, should-be-institutionalised to those who used influence, whether coercive or monetary, to escape institutionalisation (please refer to ‘The Nuts and Bolts of Sociopathology: Taking the Heat Off Unstable Personalities in Government’, Chapter V, Miscellaneous);

Etcetera and et al (please refer to ‘Without Exceptions, With Exemptions: The Theory of Affirmative Denial’, Chapter V, Miscellaneous).

4. “Exemption” means “freedom, immunity, liberty, licence, release, exoneration, excuse, renunciation, exculpation, remission, amnesty, pardon, dismissal” and, in case of legal dispute, “reprieve”, full, total, irrevocable and non-negotiable, in perpetuam.

5. “In perpetuam” means in perpetuity, forever, always, not on your life, over my [government’s] dead body.

CHAPTER II

THE FUNCTIONS, METHODOLOGY AND ROUTINES OF EXEMPTIONS

1. To provide “the most level of level playing fields” to the poorest, most handicapped, least influential sections of society. The Act recognises that stealing bread is not the same as stealing from FIIs, and that stealing from mega investors is not the same as stealing from a paranoid cancer patient’s under-the-mattress current account stash. Due to unreasonable pressures on the judiciary—exacerbated by the unjustified call to put it under the Lokpal’s scanner—the bread stealer can end up with a heavier sentence than those given to stalwarts of society the press sensationally calls “bourse bandits”. After much deliberation among and between all political parties, it was decided that the only way to level the field was to banish legal condemnation, to destroy the difference between punisher and punishee, and, thus, exemptor and exemptee, and to close the distance between the citizen and his rights to freedom of thought, articulation, opportunity, intent, action and consequences.

2. Having passed the Exemptions Act, the State exempts itself from having to enforce the Act, which in turn exempts the State from any mandate to follow the letter and spirit of the Act. This loop has been designed to be indefinitely sustainable. The State believes that the Act is self-motivated, self-organising, self-enforcing, self-repairing and self-amending. It is not, however, self-sacrificing, even when sufficient, but illusory, reasons for the same make an appearance.

3. The State believes that society must learn to organise itself around exemptions, and not exemptions around society. The State exempts itself from any role in this learning curve.

4. It thus devolves upon every citizen to protect himself, his loved ones, his property and his rights, in the pursuit of which he is exempt from all legal reproof—but not exempt from the spirit and actions of those seeking to equally exercise their rights. The exemptions mandated in the Act have been drawn up in the eternal spirit of equality, egality and fraternity.

5. Exemptions that were already in place when the Central (Absolute) Exemptions Act, 2011 came into effect are, by virtue of prior existence, exempt from any untoward consequences of the Exemptions Act taking over the role of actuator and moderator. The State, however, is not responsible for two or more exemptions in complete, or even partial, opposition to one another. Nor is it responsible for mediating an understanding/treaty/truce between opposing exemptions, for prophylactic negotiations, for mediating a capitulation, for treating the wounded, or for pulling the plug on an exemption in deep coma. In short, the State has no interest in intervening in a shootout between, for example, reservationists and meriteers, who are mutually exempt.

6. The State enjoins upon opposing exemptions to behave with decorum in the conflict-settlement arena, to independently arrange for blood transfusions from the International Society of the Red Cross, and to respect and make an attempt, at the very least, to adhere to the treaties and protocols of the Geneva Conventions, which the exemptions are not exempt from.

7. The State refuses to umpire, referee, counsel, instruct, monitor, mentor or adjudicate vis-à-vis the Act.

CHAPTER III

EXEMPTIONS FROM EXEMPTIONS

At the outset, the State must clarify that this clause, which had no place in the original document, was forced upon it by an influential and insistent section of the civil society. The State still believes that exemptions from exemptions defeats the very purpose of the Central (Absolute) Exemptions Act, 2011, which is to free every citizen from the sociocultural and legal consequences of his actions, whether well thought out or impulsive, altruistic or selfish, beneficial to all or to absolutely nobody.

This chapter is still under consideration, and it is hoped that if it shows the slightest signs of breathing, the main body of the Act will train its weapons upon it to exempt it from active duty.

1.Proposed for complete exemption from exemptions are:-

a. Members of Parliament.

b. Bureaucrats, joint secretary & above.

c. The Hon’ble Prime Minister who is already exempt from contesting elections to the Lok Sabha.

d. The judiciary—lower, higher and all the levels between, from a court typist to the Hon’ble Chief Justice of India.

e. Journalists—junior, senior, desk-bound, field correspondents, etc. Journalists are the daily archivists of society, however shoddy their archiving might be. Not only must they be in a position to inform the future of the workings of government on society, but to critique the workings as well. The State, along with civil society, believes that if journalists can report on crossings of the politicolegal and socioethical lines, their proximity to such knowledge should deny them the shelter of exemption from acting based on the knowledge. They must be exempt from exemptions. While the State recognises that the promise of eventual punishment is a difficult burden to carry, it also believes that a journalist became a journalist by his own choice. He could have elected to be a captain, or a lieutenant, or at least a lance naik, of industry, and now be enjoying the fruits of exemptions like a billion of his compatriots.

2.“Exemptions from exemptions” means “liable, and therefore inevitably and with extreme prejudice, to be prosecuted to the full, drawn-out and publicised extent of the law possible”.

Instantly, there was an uproar in parliament by members—cutting across party lines, of course—against themselves for passing an Act without bothering to read it. For, the last named exemption, it turns out, means they would be liable for everything they do and do not do, mostly the latter. While parliamentarians are cursing themselves for passing the this Act without pausing, bureaucrats are livid with the government for not including them in the joint drafting committee. And for the first time in India’s legislative history, politicians and bureaucrats are actually clamouring against exemption for themselves. Democracy is alive and kicking.