Two democracies and their vigilante problem

While in India, the word spells bad news, in the U.S., as seen in Texas, the citizen arrester seems hardly diminished

In the world’s largest democracy, the word ‘vigilante’ evokes unsavoury images of goons stopping cattle trucks and lynching drivers, or video filming themselves assaulting men accused of love jihad, or beating up couples celebrating Valentine’s Day. A vigilante in India is both bad news and a bad word. Vigilantes are anti-democratic. They lack the values of a constitutional democracy. A consensus has emerged in India to demand that the law-and-order machinery comes down heavily on such vigilante behaviour.

So, imagine my shock when I discovered that in the world’s oldest democracy, the word ‘vigilante’ receives only half the opprobrium that we heap on it in India. The other half is suppressed by a law that makes vigilantism respectable. One form of the vigilante, in the United States, is the ‘citizen arrester’ who enjoys legal status and whose actions are protected by a law that permits him or her to pursue and arrest a person accused of breaking the law. Drawing on a legal convention that comes from the Common Law tradition in England, dating from the 12th Century, a citizen arrester can physically arrest a person, on behalf of the Monarch (now State) who is regarded by them as breaking or evading the law. There are procedures to be followed, and risks involved for wrongful arrest, but assuming that these are adhered to the citizen arrester is regarded as aiding the consolidation of a political system based on the rule of law. Because of its potential for abuse, in legal circles in the U.S., there is a debate on the need to circumscribe the scope, and eligibility, of who can be a citizen arrester.