Those who take pride in the idea of India as a Constitutional democracy are sure to be chewing their under-lip these days. Rapid developments recently have ensured that the idea of constitutional guarantees, the very foundation of our republic, stands severely threatened.
Every fundamental right — to life, livelihood, religion, speech and free movement — is under assault. Daily life has assumed the proportions of a war, in which each self-assertion comes packaged with progressively escalating levels of brute violence. Who needs an external enemy when we have the ability to manufacture an abundance of enemies within?
A couple of decades ago, V S Naipaul wrote perhaps his least read and least debated book on India — India: A Million Mutinies Now (Minerva, 1990). Perceptive as it was, Naipaul doubling as a social historian, read all the macro movements, the sub-nationality struggles, the secessionist thrusts, that were being played out on the subcontinent.
He, rather accurately, caught the pulse of prolonged agitations for political representation for the ‘sons-of-the-soil’ in Maharashtra, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Kashmir and Punjab. He saw formations like the Shiv Sena, the DMK, the Akali Dal and the Naxalites as manifestations of a critique of the Constitution.
However, in an extended conversation with me on the Dravidian movement (a substantial part of which he has quoted over five odd pages in the book), he conceded my theory that the history of all regional and sub-nationality movements have shown that they eventually end up reinforcing and acknowledging the centre, the nation.
In Naipaul’s words: “The liberation of spirit that has come to India could not come as release alone… It had to come as rage and revolt. India was now a country of a million little mutinies.” “A million mutinies supported by twenty kinds of group excess, sectarian excess, religious excess, regional excess… But there was in India now what didn’t exist 200 years before: a central will, a central intellect, a national idea. The Indian Union was greater than the sum of its parts; and many of these movements of excess strengthened the Indian state, defining it as the source of law and civility and reasonableness.”
Some of us indulging in political theory have believed that at any given time since the framing of the Constitution, at least 30 per cent of India has wanted to secede and break away. However, this presumed that they tacitly accepted the Constitution and wanted to be free to jump out of that frame. I think few of us bargained for the eventuality that, at some point, new political formations would stop bothering about the Constitution entirely and simply mock and dare it in large mass groups, making the Constitution inoperative.
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Concepts like Marathi ‘manus’, Gujarati ‘asmita’, Tamizh ‘maanam’, Bangla ‘garva’, have added on to Kashmiri ‘azadi’ and Mizo ‘mukti’. Interestingly, even the self-proclaimed ultra-patriotism of the right wing parties like the BJP too is not per se for a Constitutional India but for a Hindu ‘rashtram’. It’s some sort of a neo-structuralism in which the idea of the ‘whole’ is predicated upon the assumptions to the wholeness of its parts. In fact, the idea of the Union has stopped conveying any meaning to a people who find the Centre itself confused about its compacting function.
It seems amazing now that the State itself seems to have abandoned the Constitution as an embarrassing and inconvenient document. Till recently police skulduggery of the kind that happened in Jamia Nagar, New Delhi, was witnessed in peripheries like Kashmir, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, or the so-called ‘Naxal-infected’ areas (as if Naxals are a variety of mosquito). Through those experiences the Indian state tasted the delights of taking a holiday from the baleful gaze of the Constitution and is now trying it, under full media glare, in metropolitan spaces too.
‘Democratic deficit’ is Noam Chomsky’s term for describing the fatal inability of institutions within a democratic state to contribute positively towards sustaining democratic principles; indeed, these institutions become positive hindrances. Democracy becomes a ‘tortured’ concept when the very political forces enjoying its fruits, decide to tease it.
Raj Thackeray insists that non-Maharashtrians in Mumbai are not ‘citizens’, but ‘guests’. His argument that ‘guests’ or ‘outsiders’ snatch away the few jobs on offer from deserving locals is not balanced with a restraining call to all Maharashtrians from seeking jobs outside their state, lest they snatch way someone else’s job.
Ethno-nationalist parties in Tamil Nadu, like the MDMK, the PMK or the Dalit Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi, use the leverage they have gained through a ‘democratic’ polity, to openly plead the cause of Pol Potist anti-democratic forces like the LTTE. The unrestrained attacks on Muslims and Christians in select pockets of the country, is now opening up deep wounds, providing a graphic example of the extent to which we, as a nation, have departed from all Constitutional covenants.