In “Law Like Love1”
Everyone but the police is missing. Auden was not ignorant.
The police were always hissing.
'Law' is a word they barely know.
If untrue in general, it's true for Indian police. Lathi, encounter and water cannon; their love. The Constitution is not their cup of tea.
Bulldozer paves; power wears justice.
No matter how much the SC mends the dent. At stations, the margins always suffer.
Love seldom cares for contempt.
Imagining, if Auden dared, the Indian police- “Indianization… You never saw?
L'état de droit is French, you see. For us, law is lull, our love is law.”
1In “Law Like Love,” W.H. Auden reflects on law through many perspectives- of lovers, gardeners, and judges etc. But the enforcer's voice, the police, is strikingly missing. Their absence is not accidental; it opens a space to imagine how those who wield coercive power might speak of law. This poem is written in that gap, giving words to the silence Auden left behind.
Author is a fourth-year B.A., LL.B. student at Sai University, Chennai. Views are personal.