The troubled history of third world countries after the Second World War shows that state formation must precede nation-building and economic development, and not the other way around. The Government of India Act, 1935 was the starting point in forming the contemporary Indian state. India’s constitution makers were so impressed with its liberal nature that they took almost 250 articles verbatim from it and inserted them into their new Constitution. But the state that has emerged is not a European import. It has been built on the day-to-day practice under the bright Indian sun for over eight decades after 1860 of a liberal rule of law, and four decades of gradual parliamentary growth. Two, it contains the legacy of Mughal rule which influenced some British colonial institutions that continue till today. Three, it follows the classical conception of the Indian state whose main purpose is to protect the ‘ordered heterogeneity’ of Indian society. Despite the appearance of a centralized modern state, contemporary India is in fact loosely structured, segmentary, with considerable sharing of powers with the regional states. The regional kingdom was a central reality of Indian history and its contemporary expression is today’s linguistic state. Not unlike other subcontinental empires—Mauryas, Guptas, Mughals and the British—the Centre continues today to negotiate the proper relationship with the states through a ‘new federalism’. Four, it recognizes the pre-eminence of the primordial loyalties of a strong Indian society, which has always limited the potential for tyranny by the state, but also undercuts the individualism inherent in our liberal Constitution. While pushing for some social engineering via affirmative actions on behalf of the historically disadvantaged, the contemporary state, like the ancient Hindu king, also protects the customs of the heterogeneous, self-regulating orders of the diverse groups of Indian society as another expression of the ancient principle of ‘ordered heterogeneity’.
State formation is a continuing process. India’s has also been influenced positively by seventeen years of Jawaharlal Nehru’s rule and negatively by sixteen years of Indira Gandhi’s. Early on, it was impacted by the death of Subhas Chandra Bose in August 1945, who might have taken the state in an authoritarian direction. But also the demise of the decisive Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel in December 1950, who if he had lived longer might have set the tone for a stronger liberal state. Despite its flaws, I believe India is more than Ramachandra Guha’s ‘phipty phipty’ democracy. My Egyptian adventure made me realize that India does, indeed, offer lessons for aspiring democracies. It has kept generals out of politics, a thought uppermost in Egyptian minds but non-existent in Indian minds. Indians live together in peace with greater liberty than in almost any other developing nation. The nation is secular and plural and has given space to the minorities and the low castes, and they do not feel insecure. And over the last two decades it has also become a rapidly growing economy which is lifting millions out of poverty.
Some years ago, Fareed Zakaria, the Indian-American political commentator, coined the term ‘illiberal democracy’. The expression was designed to describe a class of states that did hold free and fair elections and saw an alternation of political parties but lacked many of the other attributes of liberalism—most important, they did not respect civil and political rights. There is no imminent danger of India joining the ranks of those states, and that too is an achievement. Democracy is now solidly anchored in India, and so a degree of accountability is assured. The trick is to make that accountability a daily, hourly reflex at all levels. Not easy!
INDIA’S CODE WORD
Some nations possess a code word which, like a key, unlocks their secrets. That word is ‘liberty’ in America’s case; égalité, ‘equality’, in the case of France; for India it is ‘dharma’. Some of the best and the worst deeds in these nations can only be understood when seen in the light of these words. Dharma can mean many things as we have seen—duty, law, justice, righteousness—but mostly it is about doing the right thing. The ideal that still exists in the Indian imagination is of a ruler guided by dharma. The outraged reaction of the people to the corruption scandals in 2011 was: ‘Dharma has been wounded.’ Just as America’s founding fathers were obsessed with liberty, so were many of India’s founders attached to dharma, so much so that they placed the dharma chakra, ‘the wheel of dharma’, at the centre of the nation’s flag. They were clear that the nation-building project was a profoundly moral one.
Like P.V. Kane, I too regard the Constitution as a ‘dharma text’ and this is where I began my quest for a strong, liberal state. India’s code word is important to my project. Fixing India’s democracy entails not only the reform of institutions but also the moral core underlying our democracy. It requires a change in people’s mindset, what we have been referring to as ‘habits of the heart’. Early on in the freedom struggle, Mohandas Gandhi discovered that the liberal language of western constitutional morality did not resonate in a deeply traditional society. But the moral language of dharma did. So, like a consummate myth-maker, he resuscitated the universal ethic of sadharana dharma from the dharma texts. His project was not unlike that of the Buddhist emperor Ashoka in the third century BCE, who had also embarked on a programme to build ‘habits of the heart’ based on ‘dhamma’ (dharma in Pali), consisting of edicts which he had engraved on pillars throughout his empire. Both men understood that nation-building entails myth-making. Gandhi was surprised to find how quickly his ‘dharma campaign’ resonated with the masses. He may not have been able to end untouchability but he did breathe life into the movement for freedom, which had hitherto been a forum for westernized debating.
It may seem strange to want to invoke tradition, especially when that tradition has been responsible for so much unjust hierarchy and social injustice. But it is a question of how one reads the past. Nation builders and revolutionaries have always known that history is ever ready to be used in the service of the future. Gandhi was aware that dharma is a pliable concept. So, he deliberately side-stepped the hierarchical concept of svadharma and the social concept of duties specific to one’s caste, and evoked instead the universal values of sadharana dharma. This sadharana dharma, as already discussed, is no ‘respecter of persons’, and is consistent with the ideal of ‘blindfolded’ justice conceived in our Constitution. Dharma, after all, has given coherence to people’s lives for centuries, reduced uncertainty and provided the self-restraint needed for a successful polity. By appealing to tradition, I am deliberately trying to break the present divide in India between the vast majority of the Indian people who are religious and lead traditional lives and modern secularists, especially of the left, who tend to dub such religious people as superstitious, bigoted and communal.
~~India Grows At Night -by- Gurcharan Das
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