Essay · Section A10 October 2026

Regulate, do not prohibit: the art of governing free people.

On the morning of a protest in New Delhi, a nursing student who lives far from her hospital found her Metro station shut. She was not protesting anything. She simply had no other way to reach her shift. Closures covered 57 stations, later 45, and 245 trains were cancelled, all to manage a single gathering at Jantar Mantar. On 9 October the Supreme Court called the order “overreaching” and drew a line that every administrator should learn by heart: the line between regulating an activity and prohibiting it. Proportionality, the Chief Justice said, “does not mean that you will use a hammer to kill a fly.” This essay argues that in a free society regulation should be the rule and prohibition the rare exception. A ban is often a confession that the State could not do the harder work of judgement. But the essay also accepts that some acts deserve nothing less than a ban, and that the real art lies in telling the two apart.

Governments like bans for understandable reasons. A ban is quick to announce, needs no judgement on the spot, and protects the officer: no one blames him for what happens at a closed station. Regulation is harder. It asks the police to frisk, to watch the cameras, to cap numbers and to keep the trains running, and it makes them answerable if something goes wrong. Yet the cost of a ban rarely falls on the person it targets. The protester walks; the student, the daily-wage worker and the elderly patient are stranded. John Stuart Mill put the principle plainly in On Liberty in 1859: power may rightfully be used against a member of a civilised community, against his will, only “to prevent harm to others”. The Constitution follows the same logic. Article 19 guarantees the freedom to assemble and then permits only “reasonable restrictions”, not abolition. In Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (2018) the Supreme Court held that protests can be regulated instead of banned.

History shows what happens when a society bans what people need or want. The United States outlawed alcohol in 1920. Drinking did not stop; it moved into illegal bars, and the profits built organised crime. The country repealed the ban in 1933. India knows the same story through its own literature. Premchand’s “Namak ka Daroga” opens with a sentence that could stand as a law of governance: when the new salt department was formed and the use of a God-given thing was forbidden, people began to trade in it secretly. The ban created the smuggler, and the smuggler created the bribe that the honest inspector Vanshidhar refuses. When Gandhi walked to Dandi in 1930 and picked up a handful of salt, he turned a prohibition on a necessity into the clearest proof that the Raj had lost its moral authority. A law that forbids what ordinary people need does not end the need. It only decides who will profit from it.

Today’s news offers better models. For years an OTP was, in practice, the only way to approve a card payment. Fraudsters learnt to phish that one six-digit code. The RBI’s new authentication directions, in force since April, keep two-factor security but no longer prescribe the tool. In the words of a former consumer affairs secretary, the RBI “chose to regulate the outcome, instead of prescribing the tool”, and made card issuers answerable when security fails. In June, over 611 million UPI payments were approved by fingerprint or face. Faced with bulk objections to voters “on unsubstantiated grounds”, the Election Commission did not stop objections altogether. It capped each person at ten forms in a claims period and required a hearing of both sides. Even in Manipur, where the State is rightly destroying opium poppy, the Forest Department has planted bamboo on 255 hectares of cleared land and is working with village chiefs. Bamboo, it says, can help restore the environment while creating livelihood opportunities. A ban that offers no other way to earn a living only waits for the poppy to return.

The counter-argument deserves full weight. Some things must not be regulated; they must be ended. The Bengal Sati Regulation of 1829 did not license widow-burning under conditions; it forbade it. The Constitution does not regulate untouchability; Article 17 abolishes it. Article 23 prohibits trafficking and forced labour, and Article 24 bars children from hazardous work. To regulate these would be to admit that they can be acceptable in some dose. Prohibition can also work in science. The Montreal Protocol of 1987 phased out the chemicals that were thinning the ozone layer, and the layer is now on the path to recovery. There is a second warning too. Regulation can harden into its own kind of prohibition. Before 1991, India’s licence-permit raj rarely banned an industry outright, yet its permissions, quotas and delays strangled enterprise just as surely. A rule that needs a hundred approvals is a ban in slow motion.

These objections do not defeat the argument; they sharpen it into a test. First, prohibit only what destroys the freedom or dignity of others — Mill’s harm, not mere discomfort or offence. Sati, bonded labour and a poppy trade described as one of the triggers of Manipur’s ethnic conflict all pass that test. A protest, a payment method and a voter’s objection do not. Second, even when the aim is legitimate, use the least restrictive tool that works, and write down why a lesser one would fail. Frisking and CCTV come before closing stations. A cap and a hearing come before abolishing objections. Third, when a ban is truly needed, offer a substitute for the demand it suppresses. The Montreal Protocol succeeded because industry had alternatives to the banned chemicals; the poppy ban will last only if bamboo pays. Fourth, keep regulation light, clear and accountable to outcomes, so that it does not become a licence raj in new clothes.

The Gomti flood in Lucknow, the worst riverfront inundation since 1982, shows the same choice in another form. In 1945 the geographer Gilbert White wrote that floods are “acts of God”, but flood losses are largely acts of man, caused by building on the flood plains of rivers. The answer is neither to abandon riverside cities nor to let anyone build anywhere. It is to regulate land use carefully: which areas stay open, which can be built on and how. Here too the wise State neither prohibits nor permits blindly. It governs.

Think again of the nursing student on the platform. She does not want a State that lets crowds do as they please; she wants her train to be safe. Nor does she want a State that keeps her safe by keeping her at home. Free people accept rules they can live with and learn to evade rules they cannot. The art of governing them is to forbid little and to regulate well. It means giving reasons for every restriction and reserving the hammer for the rare evil that no lighter tool can stop. A State that bans whatever is hard to manage soon finds itself ruling over smugglers and the stranded. A State that regulates with care governs citizens who trust it.