Forms of privileged class deviance

1. The idea

Deviance means conduct that departs from the norms a society expects. Privileged class deviance is deviance by those who hold power, committed through or protected by that power. Baxi, writing in The Crisis of the Indian Legal System (1982) and Liberty and Corruption (1989), made three points worth reproducing.

• The deviance of the powerful is more harmful than ordinary crime because it corrupts the institutions meant to control crime.
• It is under-criminalised: much of it is not an offence at all, or is an offence that is never prosecuted, because the deviants also make and enforce the law.
• It produces a crisis of legitimacy: when the people see law-makers and law-enforcers break the law with impunity, respect for law itself declines.

The forms named in the syllabus follow Baxi's grouping.

2. Official deviance: legislators, judges and bureaucrats

Official deviance is the abuse of public office for private gain or for illegitimate purposes. It has its own note under Unit II; in outline:

• Legislators. Taking money to vote or ask questions (the 1993 JMM bribery case decided in P.V. Narasimha Rao v. State (CBI/SPE), 1998 INSC 185, (1998) 4 SCC 626, and reconsidered in Sita Soren v. Union of India, 2024 INSC 161); defection for office or money; misuse of constituency funds; criminal antecedents.
• Ministers. Favouritism in contracts and allotments, misuse of discretionary quotas, and using the police and investigating agencies against opponents.
• Bureaucrats. Bribery, speed money, delay, disproportionate assets, leaking information and collusion with contractors.

3. Deviance by judges

Judicial deviance covers corruption, bias, favouring relatives practising in the same court, and conduct unbecoming of the office. The difficulty is that judges must be independent, so the remedy cannot be ordinary executive discipline. The Constitution provides only removal by Parliament on proved misbehaviour or incapacity (Articles 124(4) and 217). In K. Veeraswami v. Union of India, 1991 INSC 163, (1991) 3 SCC 655, the Supreme Court held that a High Court judge is a public servant under the anti-corruption law and can be prosecuted, but directed that no case be registered against a judge without first consulting the Chief Justice of India. The in-house procedure adopted by the Court in 1999 deals with complaints that fall short of impeachment. The contempt proceedings against a sitting High Court judge in In re Justice C.S. Karnan, 2017 INSC 455, show that misconduct can also take the form of open defiance of the Supreme Court.

4. Professional deviance

Doctors, lawyers, chartered accountants and engineers hold a monopoly granted by law in return for an ethical commitment. Deviance includes fee-splitting, unnecessary surgery, sex determination, negligent treatment, false certificates, touting, misappropriation of client money and auditors certifying false accounts. Unit IV deals with the medical and legal professions in detail.

5. Trade union deviance

Trade unions began as the weak party, but organised labour in public sector undertakings and essential services can itself abuse power. Forms of deviance: violent strikes and gheraos; bandhs that paralyse public life; intimidation of non-members; extortion from employers; collusion of leaders with management against workers; and political parties using unions for their own ends. The Supreme Court upheld the Kerala High Court's view that an enforced bandh is unconstitutional in Communist Party of India (M) v. Bharat Kumar, 1997 INSC 726, (1998) 1 SCC 201, and in T.K. Rangarajan v. Government of Tamil Nadu, 2003 INSC 371, (2003) 6 SCC 581, said that government employees have no fundamental, statutory or moral right to strike. Statutory controls on strikes and lockouts are now in the Industrial Relations Code, 2020.

6. Land law deviance

The land reform laws of the 1950s to 1970s (abolition of intermediaries, tenancy protection, ceiling on holdings) were defeated on a large scale by those they were meant to bind. Forms: benami and fictitious transfers to relatives and servants to evade the ceiling; false partitions; eviction of tenants before the law came into force; manipulation of land records with the help of revenue officials; encroachment on government and common land; and, more recently, land grabbing and fraudulent conversion of agricultural land. Land grabbing is now listed among the activities of an organised crime syndicate in section 111 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023.

7. Upper class deviance

Deviance by the rich and socially dominant: tax evasion and black money; conspicuous consumption financed by unaccounted income; hit-and-run cases where wealth buys witnesses; exploitation of domestic workers; and caste-based oppression of the weak in villages. Its marks are the use of money and influence to avoid the law, and the absence of stigma.

8. Police deviance

Custodial torture and deaths, illegal detention, fake encounters, refusal to register FIRs, extortion and collusion with criminals or with the ruling party. It has its own note under Unit III.

9. Gender based deviance

Sexual harassment at the workplace, dowry demands, domestic violence, sex-selective abortion and trafficking. Where the harasser is a superior officer, it is privileged class deviance in the clearest sense: in Rupan Deol Bajaj v. Kanwar Pal Singh Gill, 1995 INSC 616, (1995) 6 SCC 194, the head of a State police force was prosecuted for outraging the modesty of a senior woman civil servant at a party. Unit V deals with this.

10. Deviance by religious leaders and organisations

Religious leaders command devotion and money, and religious trusts often escape scrutiny. Forms: misappropriation of temple and trust funds; land grabbing by religious bodies; sexual exploitation of followers; fraud in the name of miracles and cures; and using religion to incite communal hatred or to influence voters, which is a corrupt practice under section 123(3) of the Representation of the People Act, 1951. Courts in recent years have convicted the heads of large religious organisations of rape and other offences, which shows both the scale of the problem and that prosecution is possible when the investigating agency is independent. Controls: the Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments laws of the States, the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, 2010, the general criminal law, and the State laws against superstition and black magic, such as Karnataka's Act of 2017.

How this is examined

January 2026: a 10-mark question on forms of deviance under land law, and a 6-mark note on deviance by judges. June 2025: forms of deviance by trade unions (10 marks). February 2025: white collar crime in professions. Answer structure: define privileged class deviance (Baxi), explain why it is more harmful than ordinary crime, then take the named form and give its varieties, one or two cases, and the controls. For judges, Veeraswami and the in-house procedure are the minimum.