Dear Shri Amit Shah Ji,

First of all, let me congratulate you for the "efficient" manner in which you enacted three laws of far-reaching consequences. They have received the assent of the President and have, therefore, become the law of the land. They were notified on Atal Bihari Vajpayee's birthday, which is celebrated the world over as Christmas.

As the Home Minister, you should know that Christmas is celebrated by some churches in January because they follow the lunar system. Needless to say, Christians in India are as heterogeneous as Hindus.

Why I chose to congratulate you is because you were the one who piloted the Bills in Parliament. I remember your words in the Lower House, stating that you had read every word contained in the three laws and could vouchsafe that they were foolproof.

I do not know how competent you are to judge a law and determine that it will not give rise to multiple interpretations, defeating the very purpose of the law. Had the Bills been in English, I would have read them before writing this epistle.

Though I can understand Hindi, both written and spoken, I cannot read as quickly as I can read English and assimilate the contents. That is why I did not make any such efforts.

Ideally, you should have presented the Bills in both English and Hindi, as both are our official languages. We don't have a national language! If you think that Hindi is superior, you are mistaken, as it is a language promoted by the British to substitute Persian, which was the Court language before the British first established their presence at Surat in your state.

No, my intention is not to tell you that in Gujarat, most people do not know Hindi, whereas in a state like Kerala, many understand it because they either studied it or had exposure to it in the military or elsewhere. Let me not digress here.

The three new Acts are the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), which replaces the Indian Penal Code, 1860; the Bharatiya Sakshya (BS), which replaces the Indian Evidence Act, 1872; and the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS), which replaces the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1898.

I am absolutely convinced that these laws are the most important ones enacted by the Indian Parliament. I did not mention the drafting of the Constitution because it was done by the Constituent Assembly that preceded the formation of Parliament with the first general elections held in 1952.

I am sure you know why I say this. If someone encroaches into my land or manhandles me, I will look for the relevant provisions in the IPC or the CrPC to invoke them while complaining to the police. It will be superfluous to quote the Constitution that guarantees the right to property. In other words, governance of the country is impossible without these basic laws.

I understand that it will take at least one year before the laws are introduced across the nation, from Kashmir to Kerala and Siliguri to Saurashtra. They will first be implemented in Ahmedabad in your state as a pilot project in about two months before other areas are gradually brought under them. Can I say that the BNS, BS, and BNSS will be in full force in the country by January 2025?

What I mentioned is just an indication of the overwhelming reach and power of the new laws. Yet, how were they enacted? Was there any debate worth the name? The ruling party got about 150 Opposition MPs suspended on one pretext or another and then got the three Bills passed. What was their demand?

The Opposition wanted you to make a statement in the House on how two outsiders jumped into the hall from the visitors' area in the balcony and kept the nation in suspense for a few minutes before they were arrested. They were given passes by a BJP MP from Karnataka. I can't believe that the MP had any vested interest in allowing the drama to unfold.

You and Prime Minister Narendra Modi preferred to keep mum in Parliament, forcing the Opposition to protest, leading to the en masse suspension. Would the heavens have fallen if you explained the circumstances in which they entered the new Parliament building and created mayhem?

I can imagine what you would have said if the Prime Minister was Manmohan Singh or the MP who issued the passes belonged to, say, the Muslim League or the Congress or the Samajwadi Party.

Silence is not golden when it is your duty to speak. As a result, the most important Bills were passed without any debate. They were like the three agricultural Bills, passed without any forethought. This led to the greatest-ever farmers' strike, forcing you to rescind the laws.

I already mentioned the antiquity of the laws like the IPC and the CrPC. Do you know that the IPC was drafted by Thomas Babington Macaulay, whom the Sangh Parivar is fond of attacking, though he lived in the 19th century? If you read his History of England, you will have an idea of his command of the English language.

If you read the history of the drafting of the IPC, you will know that the draft was elaborately discussed, edited, and polished over a long period before it was notified. Do you know that as soon as the Indian Constitution came into force in 1950, the need to amend it arose?

In fact, it was amended by the Provisional Parliament, elected on a limited franchise, in 1951. While the First Amendment in the US Constitution strengthened the Press, the one in India curtailed the freedom of expression of the people. In other words, it weakened the Press. The villain of the piece was Jawaharlal Nehru, whom you revile.

The Constitution was amended 106 times. In comparison, the IPC is one of the least amended laws. It is not for no reason that successive governments in India, led by leaders like Nehru, Morarji Desai, VP Singh and AB Vajpayee did not think it necessary to replace the laws. Why reinvent the wheel, they would have thought. Of course, new laws were created to deal with emerging situations.

For instance, the Supreme Court decriminalised sexual acts between two consenting adults of the same gender, done in privacy. This was because the IPC was drafted when Victorian mores prevailed in Britain. What is that?

The Victorian era is notable because it was associated with a certain set of social mores and values that, to some extent, remain to this day. Victorian morality is associated with family values, charity, and thriftiness along with sexual repression.

To give you an example, only the spouse of an MP could get travel benefits if he or she accompanied the MP. Today, any girlfriend or boyfriend can also avail of the benefits while travelling with the MP.

From time to time, new provisions were being added to the criminal code. For instance, a penetrative sexual act with a minor is now defined as rape, even if the minor had consented to it or had taken the initiative for it. But nobody from Nehru to Manmohan Singh thought it necessary to overhaul the IPC.

You and Modi seem to believe that you were born to dismantle the Nehruvian, socialist, secular, democratic framework to initiate a new Hindutva-based system in which some heads of Hindu Mutts in Tamil Nadu, who have never voted in an election, deserve to be brought to New Delhi and feted as part of the "consecration" of the new hexagonal Parliament building. The duly-installed Sengol became a mute witness to the gross breach of security when two men unleashed gas fumes against the MPs present.

It was part of your grand project to introduce a new criminal code. Now, what have you achieved? Kapil Sibal is a veteran MP. I remember him defending a judge of the Supreme Court against whom there were some cooked-up charges in Parliament. That is how I noticed him, though I used to wish his father whenever I accosted him during my morning walks at Sukhna Lake in Chandigarh. He was a senior lawyer of the Punjab and Haryana High Court.

I hope you have heard what Kapil Sibal said about the BNS. He said 90 per cent of the BNS is copied from the IPC, except that it is in Hindi. In English, there is a phrase, "old wine in a new bottle". I was reminded of this phrase when I heard Sibal.

I was recently invited to give a sermon in Hindi. I can speak in Hindi, but I do not have the confidence to give a sermon in Hindi. So what I did was to write it in English. I then used the Google Translate software to translate the speech. When I delivered it like Modi Ji delivering his speeches as when he addressed the Christian community in Delhi using a teleprompter, it evoked a good response.

I am sure the mandarins in your ministry would have used the software while drafting the BNS. Sibal gives you credit for drafting 10 per cent of the new code. You yourself gave an indication of what you did in Parliament. You blamed the Colonial masters for the harshness of the IPC. Yes, it was harsh towards homosexuals, lesbians, and anyone who did what was considered "unnatural sex". Yes, sedition invited severe punishment.

You claimed in your speech that you have made the BNS attuned to the needs of the day. True, the British were harsh in dealing with those who challenged their authority or those who attempted to overthrow their rule. But nobody was allowed to go scot-free. Anyone they thought guilty was brought before the law and punished.

Can you cite one single instance of the wife or son or daughter of a freedom fighter who was arrested or harassed? Yes, some of them were punished and sent to the cellular jails in Andamans. But when they sent letters of apology, they were given a chance to return to the mainland and even become a "national hero".

The BNS has provisions that are harsher than the IPC. It was impossible under the British Raj to arrest Fr Stan Swamy or Siddique Kappan and keep them in jail for years, till the former died in captivity and the latter had to struggle to get bail when bail is the norm. I won't blame you alone for the harshness of the laws.

It was P. Chidambaram and others of the Congress who drafted many draconian laws which you implemented without showing any mercy. But to say that the BNS is better than the IPC is to stretch the truth too far.

This week, the country faced a grave situation when the truck drivers struck work. There was panic buying of petroleum products and essential items. The people in Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, and Himachal Pradesh were the worst affected.

Fortunately, Home Secretary Ajay Bhalla, who reports to you, was able to pacify the drivers. He held talks with the All India Motor Transport Congress (AIMTC), and as a result, the strike was called off. I am sure you know why the drivers went on strike. They were protesting against Section 106 (2) of the BNS.

The impugned section deals with hit-and-run cases. In such cases, they will get 10 years of imprisonment and a fine of Rs 7 lakh. There are millions of drivers in the country. How many of them use their vehicles to kill pedestrians? Yes, there are accidents. The new law mandates that the drivers inform the police and help them in the investigation.

The drivers' tendency is to run away. This is because when a truck hits a car or a scooter or a pedestrian, the public would automatically turn against the truck driver. There are umpteen cases of lynching of drivers. Under the IPC, the punishment in hit-and-run cases was only two years.

See, even before the new law came into force, there was such a massive protest. This exposes the incompetency in drafting the laws. I wish you had remembered the maxim: it is the certainty of punishment, not the severity of it, that deters crime. There is a saying, "act in haste, repent at leisure". Please remember this while amending the BNS, even before it has come into force.

Yours etc
ajphilip@gmail.com