75 years after its Independence, India seems to have forgotten its own pledges made long before getting freedom as it has evolved to be so much different from its own socio-cultural legacy and has pretty-much sickened so as not to hold its trait of being inclusive. Such heartrending departure from the pledges those we were supposed to redeem has taken place eventually over a long period of time so much slowly that we don’t know as to when we have broken away from the resolutions made during the “tryst with destiny”.
What is more disturbing is the onus-shifting and mudslinging among the political parties and their leaders coupled with a constant quest for vilifying another for the vices in governance, economy and society.
The irony is we have indulged so much in self-aggrandising that we have failed to notice this downward spiralling of Indian society and darkening of the soul of the nation. Our self-aggrandisement is based on a somewhat schizophrenic sense of achievement. Our colonial past and the blood-shedding and perspiration to get rid of it gave us a ‘Constitution’ full of dreams which we call our ‘constitutional goal’, but the way towards its accomplishment is solely dependent on how we take it ahead; and there is no alchemist’s formula for this. However, we got too much contentment with those dreams that we forgot to act upon them, to make them true.
This practice has reduced us to mere dreamers and not doers and thinkers; our dreams lost the necessary extension of age-appropriate action.
We have, therefore, presumed that we are too democratic and inclusive and that we have got all this in legacy. This has made us so complacent that unknowingly, we have got into the oblivion of achievement while we are slowly losing our plurality and diversity because it doesn’t mean a mere political coexistence but social coherence with a sense of tolerance that means having a common ground of convergence of differing opinions at least in the national interest and accepting and respecting each other’s differences.
This is not to say about electoral politics, which remains thick with grime and has almost been running contrary to our innate democratic values and political equality of the ‘majority’ and the ‘minority’. The inevitability of such circumstances has been obvious though mainly because we have slipped into mechanical constitutionalism and not constitutional morality thereby amounting to a haemorrhaged Indian state.
In its new avatar, the Indian state is gradually moving into a phase of attracting allegiance tempered more with fear than out of affection, which will prove way more dangerous to the future of the nation. Now that we are standing at the threshold of the ‘bad’ present and an ‘irreversibly-worse’ future, however, we can still get back but absolutely not by denial; and it is being told without having any sense of political affinity.
India at 75 cannot afford this any further; it has to trudge the new path to the same old constitutional virtue and morality but by learning from the experiences of the past.
It should learn that while it is the right of the political majority to rule and there is no denying in that but at the same time it is the duty of the political majority to respect the opinions of the political minority, which has an absolute right to be heard and exist with dignity which is both a constitutional right and a constitutional obviousness.
And under such circumstances the role of civil society seems to be critical being a balancing force between diametrically-differing opinions and cementing the cracks that appear in our national life. We cannot afford any further to carry on with this politics of dominance of the stronger over the weaker. Be it the hegemony of the dominant caste, class or race, we have to reject such majoritarianism.
Majoritarianism is an anathema to democracy and development because in a democracy impermanence of the ruler is the only permanence and what is static is not democratic. So, there has to be a peaceful deliberation and, sometimes, even hustle.
Democracy is a state of ‘paradoxical equilibrium’ of acceptance and dissent. Therefore, for any prudent statesman, there is no permanent majority or minority and each side should be truly heard and action should flow from judicious examination of the opinions in the interest of the nation and not from the whims or majoritarian sentiments when ill-informed, parochial or self-centric. This is not a call for an anti-majoritarian approach but an effort to make the majority aware of its constitutional limitations and duty of self-restrain.
We have another five billion years for the sun to run out of hydrogen and die; and it seems we have to live quite a long time before that, which is why we should stop for a while and introspect and re-imagine brand ‘India’ as this is going to determine where our future generations are going to stand and what kind of life they are going to lead and live.
It is time we should be desperately trying to come out of all sorts of ‘rhetoric without a future’ and more than anything should try to augment, democratise and invest in health, education and innovation. It is, therefore, necessary to re-imagine brand-India with the lines from Rabindranath’s ‘Gitanjali’, “Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; Where knowledge is free; Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit…. Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.”
Having said that, what remains is while reimagining brand-India, we must ask to ourselves and find answers to the question, “Has India forgotten to redeem its pledge superficially, let alone substantially?” It is because this will prove to be a ‘potential-propellant’ to implement our new resolution to act upon the old resolutions made during the quest for ‘Swaraj’.
(The writer is a lawyer and public policy expert and a Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Law and Media Studies at School of Mass Communication, KIIT deemed to be University. He can be reached at sjyotiranjan3@gmail.com)