Admiration for a rebel’s self-sacrifice can outweigh legal arguments for punishment

Evidence

James Routledge, editor of the Friend of India and the India correspondent for the Times of London, captured the nature of this bond in his description of the case of a convicted Wahhabi: ‘that the history will some day be read with just pride in India, when India knows its own most honourable records, I take to be among the certainties of life’. Routledge did not question that the man was guilty, but provocatively suggested: ‘We may be bound, for the safeguard of society, to punish rebellion, whatever its cause or justification; but are we not also bound by the highest laws to admire such heroism and self-sacrifice as these men evinced?’ Routledge, in appealing to a higher law beyond the mundane workings of the colonial judiciary, fractured the concept of the rule of law. Ultimately, appeals to the affective laws of honour and sympathy may have been as influential in pressuring the colonial government to release convicted Wahhabis as arguments about the legality of their detention and imprisonment. — Julia Stephens, The Phantom Wahhabi, 190

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The idea that affect — honour, sympathy, admiration — can trump the rule of law even in a colonial state’s own press is a durable provocation about how legal legitimacy actually works.
• SEED: An essay on ‘the higher law’ as a rhetorical Trojan horse: how appeals to honour have historically loosened states’ claims to punish rebellion.