SUNDAY, APRIL 21, 2024
Columnists are not soothsayers, and they should never pretend they can look far into the future.
The future has a nasty habit of surprising us.
Good to remember this while pondering over the incongruency of a process beginning to elect the legislatures of five States even as news unfolds of surgical strokes fast whittling away at our memory of participatory governance.
The dictionary insufficiently describes democracy as: 1a (1): a government having a chief of state who is not a monarch and who in modern times is usually a president; (2) a political unit (such as a nation) having such a form of government; b (1): a government in which supreme power resides in a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officers and representatives responsible to them and governing according to law.
At the core of all these definitions, and many more in dozens of books on the social sciences, are people of free will participating in activities of collective good, charting their way by mutual consent in an environment without duress and hurdles.
We the people of India began this process soon after independence from Britain. The Constituent Assembly drafted in written constitution for the nation which became operational with the forming of the Republic on January 30, 1950.
The constitution has served us well. It has been amended, expanded, more than a hundred times. But its core has been protected, shielded from the tossing of waves in the neighbourhood. It has survived an attempt or two at secession, many armed insurrections, even a temporary suspension.
Political parties have had their chance at governance, and within those parties and coalitions, mortal men, and one woman, have had their chance at national leadership.
Such a process has come true in many a country, not just in the so-called banana republics of Latin America. Or the tin pot military regimes of Africa, or the emerging stages of the Far East. The rulers of the now rich nations of West Asia trace their rule to God, if not their genes to a divine being.
Europe, the role model, has been a major victim.
Our neighbourhood is a collection of failed and nearly failed states. Civil wars, military coups and theocratic ambitions, have leached away whatever there was left of the heritage of people’s participation in the Freedom Struggle of which Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was such a tall part. Much of this is because of Bapu, the Mahatma. His assassination by Nathuram Godse, made him immortal. His concern for the underdog, the minority, found reflection in the final edit of the Preamble of the Constituency. It talks not just of equality and fundamental rights, but of fraternity.
Practising fraternity is not an easy task. Every Christian who parrots the command of Jesus the Christ “love thy brother as thyself” will tell you that he and most others have failed to carry the command even in their biological families. How to be equitable in earthly goods and invisible bonds of love with people who do not look like, dress like you, eat different sorts of food, and dress differently.
Inanimate objects, rather than profound philosophical or political concepts and axioms, best illustrate this push which has now come to a shove.
India Gate that sheltered the Eternal Flame in honour of the memory of all the soldiers who died for the country in modern times, is now just a memorial to the sons who died in the two world wars. The flame is extinguished. It had failed its name of being Eternal.
A more patriotic memorial with an expandable wall will list the martyrs in wars since independence and future ones. The canopy made empty by removing the statue of King Emperor George will now loom over a granite one of Subhash Chandra Bose.
Ironically, Bose led an army which was confronted by an Allied force of which the Indian soldiers was much a part. Bose had shaken hands with the Axis powers. His defiance of the British has nonetheless earned him a spot deep in the heart of the Indian masses.
Our heroes are long dead. It is a moot question if Bose would have wanted his statue saluting the heart of a vista once designed to show the might of the British empire.
Nor will we know how Mahatma Gandhi feels that his statue at prayer has been rudely uprooted and awaits a new Parliament house.
But we the people do wonder about the fate of the Constitution of India. Prime minister made an abortive attempt to revise it thoroughly. He was quietened by the fact that the committee under a retired chief justice of India quaked at the task, and admitted itself unequal to the job of trashing the document written under the chairmanship of Babasaheb Ambedkar.
A committee is now formed to “update” the Indian Penal Code and the Criminal Procedure Code, both well over a century and a half years old. Will they retain laws as the unlawful activities prevention act (UAPA) now used to put thousands of young men and women in jail without bail? Or will there be an even harsher law? No one knows.
If new codes replace these vestiges of the past, will it auger a new constitution revising definitions of citizenship? No one knows. It is within the realm of the possible.
Clutching at straws, this columnist could sing Reason and Fraternity, Abide with Me, Fast falls the Evening Gloom. The hymn, however, will never be heard on Raj path’s Vijay Chowk, where military bands had played it for more than half a century.
(John Dayal is an author, editor and an activist, who lives in New Delhi)
