By Milinda Moragoda
Throughout history, governments confronted with dissent have repeatedly reached for the same instrument: arrest. The logic is understandable. Remove a troublesome individual from the public square, and perhaps the ideas, movement or political challenge associated with that person will weaken.
Sometimes coercion achieves its immediate objective. Governments possess police powers for good reason, and no political figure or activist should be immune from ordinary criminal law. Violence, intimidation, destruction of property and other genuine criminal conduct remain criminal regardless of the political beliefs of those responsible.
But a different question arises when criminal law is perceived as being directed at peaceful political expression, or when its application appears selective, disproportionate or politically motivated.
Here the calculation becomes more dangerous.
The paradox of the iron fist is not that repression always fails. History would not support such a conclusion. It is that coercion can carry consequences far beyond its immediate purpose. An arrest intended to demonstrate strength can expose institutional weakness. An obscure critic can become a symbol. A divided public can become more polarized. And institutions created to administer justice can gradually lose the confidence on which their authority depends.
When the arrest becomes the argument
Governments can imprison people. Ideas are considerably more difficult to contain.
When criminal law is perceived as being used principally against political expression, the state risks changing the question in the public mind. People may initially have asked whether the dissident was right or wrong. They may now ask why the state considered that dissident sufficiently threatening to require coercion.
The arrest itself becomes part of the political argument.
It can also give an otherwise marginal figure a prominence that he or she could never have achieved alone. Before an arrest, a critic may struggle for attention in a crowded political environment. Afterwards, the state can become the critic’s most effective publicist.
Eugene V. Debs provides a striking historical example. Imprisoned in 1919 after a speech opposing American participation in the First World War, Debs did not disappear politically. He contested the 1920 presidential election from prison and received more than 900,000 votes.
This does not mean imprisonment automatically creates martyrs. It plainly does not. The lesson is narrower: governments cannot fully control the political meaning of their own coercive actions.
An arrest intended to diminish someone can elevate that person. A prosecution intended to discredit an argument can give it a larger audience. The state may win the immediate contest while enlarging the political problem.
The politics of punishment
There is another danger—one that concerns societies as much as governments.
In deeply polarized societies, punishment can itself become a form of political gratification. When politics is increasingly understood through the categories of friend and enemy, the arrest of an opponent may be welcomed with remarkably little interest in the legal principles involved. The satisfaction comes from seeing someone associated with the other side defeated or humiliated.
Economic hardship and social frustration can make this temptation stronger. When people feel insecure, disappointed or powerless, complicated failures invite simple explanations and identifiable villains. Punishment provides the emotional satisfaction of action even when it does little to address the conditions that produced the anger.
This is fertile ground for arbitrary power because arbitrary power is rarely presented to the public as an abstract constitutional proposition. It arrives attached to a person whom some substantial section of society already dislikes.
That makes the essential questions easy to forget.
What precisely is the alleged offence? Is the law being applied consistently? Is the response proportionate? Would we accept the same exercise of state power if it were directed against someone whose politics we shared?
That final question may be the most useful test.
The rule of law is not seriously tested when it protects people we admire. Its value becomes apparent when it protects people we dislike.
A society that becomes comfortable with arbitrary power because it is initially exercised against unpopular people is not strengthening justice. It is weakening the restraints that protect everyone.
Political power changes hands. Precedents remain.
Closing the safety valve
There is also a practical reason to protect peaceful dissent.
Stable political systems need ways through which grievances can be expressed, contested and absorbed. Elections, parliamentary debate, independent media, peaceful demonstrations and civil society allow political pressure to be released without threatening the constitutional order.
Peaceful dissent is therefore not merely something a democracy reluctantly tolerates. It is one of democracy’s safety mechanisms.
When peaceful criticism begins to attract criminal sanction, that mechanism becomes less effective.
Moderates can be weakened when constitutional dissent and genuinely dangerous conduct are treated as though they belong to the same category. Opposition may move into less visible and less accountable forms. And people who conclude that lawful avenues of expression are meaningless may become more receptive to disruptive alternatives.
The irony is clear. A government can suppress dissent in the name of public order while weakening some of the mechanisms that make public order sustainable.
A society does not necessarily become stable merely because it becomes quiet.
The damage to Institutions
The most serious long-term cost may fall not on the dissidents but on the institutions required to enforce the law.
Police, prosecutors and courts derive much of their authority from the belief that they act according to law rather than political convenience.
If law-enforcement agencies come to be perceived as instruments for settling political scores, even legitimate investigations become vulnerable to suspicion. If prosecutorial discretion appears to vary according to political identity, confidence in equal treatment before the law deteriorates. If courts are perceived — fairly or unfairly — as extensions of political power, legal authority itself begins to lose legitimacy.
This damage is cumulative.
Most citizens obey most laws not because a police officer is standing beside them but because they broadly accept the authority of the system administering those laws. Once that confidence declines, governments face a dangerous cycle: reduced trust encourages greater reliance on coercion, while greater coercion creates still more distrust.
The state can therefore become stronger in appearance while becoming weaker in substance.
Institutional unpredictability also carries an economic cost. Investors, entrepreneurs and skilled professionals can live with political disagreement. What is harder to accommodate is uncertainty over whether rules will be applied impartially. A single controversial arrest does not cause an economic exodus, but repeated perceptions of arbitrary power can contribute to a broader loss of confidence in the institutional environment.
Restraint is not weakness
None of this requires political naivety.
States have both the right and the responsibility to protect citizens from violence, terrorism, intimidation and genuine criminal conduct. Political beliefs cannot provide immunity from prosecution, just as political unpopularity cannot justify prosecution without proper legal grounds.
The distinction is between enforcing law against unlawful conduct and using law as an instrument for managing political disagreement.
That distinction becomes especially difficult during periods of polarization because people naturally apply principles inconsistently. We are highly sensitive to abuses committed against those we support and remarkably tolerant of similar abuses directed against those we dislike.
But constitutional restraints are valuable precisely because they are meant to survive our changing sympathies.
Due process is not an endorsement of the accused. Freedom of expression does not require agreement with the speaker. Equal treatment before the law does not require affection for the person receiving it.
These principles exist because a functioning political order cannot safely decide, case by case, who deserves them.
Coercion can produce obedience. But obedience is not the same as legitimacy.
Nor should restraint be mistaken for weakness. The durable strength of a political system lies partly in its ability to distinguish between disagreement and danger, between opposition and criminality, and between the temporary satisfaction of punishment and the longer-term requirements of justice.
The temptation to abandon those distinctions is greatest when societies are angry, divided and frustrated.
That is precisely when they matter most.
The strongest state is not necessarily the one with the strongest hand. It is the one that has the least need to use it.
(Milinda Moragoda, Founder of the Pathfinder Foundation can be contacted via [email protected])
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the official position of this publication.
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