Daily Life Blues
Published : 23 October 2026
•
Updated : 23 October 2026, 01:34
Khalid Khan
PHOTO: PRABIR DAS
Dhaka is the noisy, chaotic capital of Bangladesh. Whenever you go out for a walk, you will always find its footpaths occupied by hawkers, often illegally, without having to pay any legal fee. A formal shopkeeper, in contrast, has to obtain trade permission, pay rents, taxes, and utility bills for carrying on his business in commercial spaces. Similarly, it is all the more convenient to park a car on the street illegally than to find a legal parking spot, which costs you money. The unfit buses emitting black smoke often get away with their non-compliance, whereas the fit ones have to bear the cost of renovation, production of fitness certificates, etc. These scenes appear far too common. But rarely do we ask what led the city to fall into such disarray.
The recent advent of e-rickshaws makes the asymmetry more apparent. While a licensed vehicle owner has to face legal hurdles for violating the traffic rules, the same does not apply to the unlicensed, unregulated e-rickshaws. With weak brakes, high speeds, and a lack of control, they often imperil the lives of pedestrians, especially children on the streets. Seeing all these irregularities and asymmetric application of law, one may be tempted to breach the law rather than to comply with it. Anarchy in Dhaka thus seems the natural conclusion for rational actors.
This apparent chaos in Dhaka can be explained using HLA Hart’s concept of sanction. Hart was one of the most influential legal theorists of the last century. In his magnum opus ‘The Concept of Law’, in which he developed his own theory of legal positivism, Hart devoted a significant portion of the book to critiquing Austin, one of the earliest proponents of legal positivism. Austin defined law as the command of the sovereign backed by sanction. By sanction, he meant the pain or punishment inflicted upon a person in case of non-compliance with a sovereign command. Its purpose is to provide the motivation for abiding by law. Without a sanction, there can be no command; without command, there can be no law at all. Thus, sanction plays an essential role in Austin’s legal theory.
Contrarily, Hart showed that sanction is not always necessary for the existence of law since people may obey the law, not out of fear of harm, but out of respect for the authority or being morally obliged. But Hart discovered something more to it. Despite being a legal positivist, who viewed law merely as a system of rules devoid of moral content, Hart conceded that a few rules of conduct must exist in order for any community to survive. They have their foundations in the human condition itself and are thus named as ‘the minimum content of natural law.’ These are derived from the five truisms about ourselves: (1) we are all vulnerable to each other, (2) we are approximately equal in powers, (3) we are selfish (limited altruism), in general, (4) we have limited resources, (5) we suffer from limited understanding and strength of will.
These limitations necessitate the formulation of some rules for the protection of life and property. However, the fifth truism is particularly useful to explain the situation in Dhaka. Because of our limitations in the understanding of the world along with our limited strength of will, we are often tempted to pursue our own immediate interests without considering their far-reaching consequences. This requires the establishment of social organisations for detecting and punishing them (sanction), without which many would succumb to such temptations.
Notably, the sanction Hart refers to here is different from the one Austin developed. According to Hart, the object of punishment (sanction) is not to supply the motive for obedience but to serve as a ‘guarantee that those who would voluntarily obey shall not be sacrificed to those who would not’. In other words, sanction exists so that a person is not put at a greater disadvantage for obeying the law than the one who violates it. Thus, Hart pointed out that the lack of sanction does not nullify the existence of law (as Austin described) but may reduce its efficacy.
Dhaka, if not the whole of Bangladesh, is facing the same crisis that Hart had warned us about. Due to the limitations in our human nature, there is always a temptation to breach the law for immediate self-interest. However, the social organisations exist so that such violations do not go unpunished. When law imposes sanctions on a particular class of people while others remain unchecked, it not only engenders disparity but also endangers the proper functioning of a society. This also shows why enforcement of law is necessary to a certain extent in order to create a viable social organisation. Because, in the absence of the threat of sanction, breaking the law becomes more profitable than abiding by it. The result is complete chaos, as we now see in Dhaka.
Khalid Khan works as a Law Desk Assistant at Law & Our Rights, The Daily Star.