In a system where even dignity requires documentation, who’s the real villain of Jitu Munda’s story?

Our rules-bound system, that privileges compliance over dignity, was functioning as intended — until Munda dug out his sister’s skeletal remains. Accepting this is uncomfortable because we are willing, active participants in it

The outrage against officials of a bank in Odisha’s Keonjhar district, who refused to release Jitu Munda’s sister Kalara Munda’s savings because he did not furnish the required documentation, is, at best, myopic and, at worst, a convenient moral deflection. The outrage rests on the premise that the bank officials committed an arbitrary act, harassing Munda into doing what he did — exhuming the skeletal remains of his sister to offer proof of death.

But was it arbitrary, or was it adherence to an impersonal order that defines the modern bureaucratic system? It is far simpler to pin the blame on half a dozen of its agents, manning a bank in a small town, than to confront the leviathan whose primary beneficiaries are, by design, those who conform to it.

This is not to absolve the bank completely. Not being sensitive to Munda’s poverty and illiteracy, not doing more to help him understand what he needed to claim the money, going about their day instead of taking extra time — these are all choices. They may not have been the right ones, but they were made within a system that explicitly requires officials to deny Munda his money in the absence of the required papers, and actively deters them from doing otherwise.

The bank officials acted as they did because those are the rules they must follow to remain legitimate parts of that system. The consequences of not doing so could harm them. So, where does individual agency end and systemic logic take over?

Max Weber would say we do make our own choices, but within the constraints of rules and institutions. In Economy and Society, he introduces “rational-legal authority”, the first fundamental category of which is a “continuous rule-bound conduct of official business”. The central idea is our belief in the validity of rules: We enforce them not because someone has asked us to, but because they are central to the smooth functioning of the system. This shared belief is what keeps the system alive and legitimate.

In Keonjhar, then, the system functioned as intended before producing a morally reprehensible outcome. Nothing “went wrong” in procedural terms. The officials chose — perhaps not deliberately — to act within the rules of a system in which cruelty and compliance are not contradictory categories. It is the bank’s mechanical insistence on documentation, on the “rules”, and not only the act of Munda digging out his sister’s remains, that should also shake the human conscience.

But it does not. Because rules are rules. We have all been conditioned to uphold them, partly because doing so makes us responsible citizens, and partly because not doing so invites reprisal. The choices we make can be free, so long as they remain within the bounds of rational-legal authority.

Somewhere in our personal yet mechanical duty to society, we decided to relegate — if not forego — the absolute inner worth of all moral beings: Dignity. The rational-legal system has no empathy clause, because scripting one would reduce efficiency and, more fundamentally, require abandoning universalism: Fairness means treating everyone the same. That premise, however, does not accommodate the reality that people are not the same and do not arrive at the system from the same starting point. In Munda’s case, dignity was contingent on documents (a death certificate, which can take weeks to get). Yet, the system, by virtue of being “rational”, presupposes that all individuals are equally capable of acquiring, maintaining, and producing them. Without those, Munda also had no right to be heard.

Contrast this with the woman in Mumbai who recently screamed at Maharashtra’s Water Resources Minister over traffic caused by his demonstration. She spoke English, looked affluent, and did not appear to be “undocumented”. She could fight the system without fear of the state.

The same goes for the rest of us with financial and social capital. If I were the victim of the bank’s rigidity in Keonjhar, my advantages — education, money, caste — would have made me demand, with uncloaked indignation, the time and services of a bank manager. Jitu Munda has none of that, and the system, indifferent by design to that inequality, has no way of accounting for it.

In such systems, built purely on rationality, efficiency, and control, the result is a structural absence of empathy. It is the kind of absence that allows bank officials to turn Munda away until he takes a drastic, conscience-shattering step, and the kind that allows the rest of us to move on once the shock of that step has faded, without sparing a thought for the many Jitu Mundas this country produces all the time.

The incident was closed after Munda was awarded the money — Rs 19,300 plus Rs 102 in interest — and the Odisha Chief Minister ordered a high-level probe. But what probe into Munda’s dehumanisation can make a difference, if the functioning of the system depends on treating humans as objects within a rule-bound process?

Jitu Munda’s story reached us because of what he did and the video that captured it, not because of the way he was treated. Our outrage, therefore, should not be directed at the bank, but at the system. There will be discomfort in that because we are willing and active participants in it. But that will be a more honest response.

The writer is deputy copy editor, The Indian Express. [email protected]