When Satish Sawhney of the Nehru Centre invited me to deliver this inaugural lecture in the series �Challenges to Indian Democracy�, I readily agreed because I must unabashedly confess that I have been a great admirer of Panditji: ever since I first saw him in Shimla where I went to school it was during the Cripps Mission way back in 1942.
He was on horseback and I was on foot. He raced past me cheerily acknowledging my greeting with a loud emphatic �Jai Hind�; impressionable as I was then, the salutation is still ringing in my ears! Then I heard him speak in the early 50s at an open-air function in far away Rangoon (the place where I was born) when I was visiting my parents in Burma. Panditji spoke with such intensity and such disarming frankness that it was for me a memorable event I felt instinctively drawn towards him: I experienced that �beneficial glow of being in the presence of the great� what we call �darshan�. Ambassador Galbraith, always used to say that darshan is sought in all societies but only Indians �are candid enough to endow it with a name!�
It is sometimes said that the system of parliamentary democracy we have adopted, is an alien one and it does not suit the Indian ethos. Not true. The Westminster Model was not foisted on us by the British, as is often believed.
The first non-official attempt at drafting a Constitution of India was made way back in 1895 under the inspiration of Lokmanya Tilak. It was known as the Constitution of India Bill, 1895. In its first chapter it envisaged a Parliament of India and an electoral system in which every citizen had one vote. Thirty years later, came another attempt at Constitution-making. Under the chairmanship of Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru, India’s political leaders prepared a Bill providing for self-government and sent it to England. The Labour Party which was in power in the UK was responsive to Indian aspirations, and its leaders introduced in Britain’s Parliament the Commonwealth of India Bill, 1925, which also provided for a parliamentary system of government.
The Bill passed its first reading in the House of Commons, and was even ordered to be printed! But the Labour Party lost its majority in the Commons soon after and Indian aspirations were set back for nearly 20 more years.
Why has our parliamentary system of democracy not worked? I think that is not the right question the question should be: why have we failed to work a system which guarantees (as no other system), a free and democratic way of life? It worked and worked well for the first 19 years after Independence. What has happened since then?
I think the answer lies in this it ceased to work well the moment politics in this country became immoral and unprincipled. We have not been able to work the system we cannot work any system unless we reinject some degree of morality into politics. In one of its issues in the early 1990s that prestigious periodical ‘The Economist’ expressed an opinion which was both frank and brutal. It said: �India will continue to be misgoverned until politics become more of a vehicle for policies instead of the other way round� i.e. instead of policies being fashioned to suit the politics of the day.
Democracy is not enough because democracy does not simply mean majority rule but majority rule that is fair: otherwise described as the Rule of Law. Without doubt the Rule of Law is the dominant legitimating slogan in the world today. But what is the rule of law?
In 1955, Jawaharlal Nehru as Prime Minister inaugurated the Congress of the International Commission of Jurists: it was a famous Congress because it adopted what is now known as the Delhi Declaration of the Rule of Law. Speaking of the changes in society, Nehru said the Rule of Law was not a static concept but that it had to run closely to (what he described) as the �Rule of Life�. �It cannot go off at a tangent from life’s problems and offer answers to the problems of yesterday which are of no importance today.�
And he gave the following example of the close interrelation of law and social conditions: �If the distinguished lawyers and jurists of Plato’s day had met together and they were very able men they would have taken slavery for granted, human slavery. When they accepted slavery no one challenged it. And yet later it was not only challenged and condemned but uprooted practically all over the world because the social mind would not accept it.�
This last bit in that quote �the social mind would not accept it� reveals one of the major challenges to Indian democracy: can be illustrated with an example.
In China, its government has conceived of the ambitious Three Gorges Project to tame the Yangtze River upon its completion it will be the largest hydro-power plant is the world in terms of total installed capacity and annual power generation. It will also be the world’s largest water conservation facility. But it will also inundate 653 sq kms of densely populated area the world’s largest area inundated by a single project: over 1 million people would have to be resettled. The Three Gorges Project beneficial as it is in the long run would be an impossibility in India under the rule of law: �the social mind will not accept it�.
The Chinese believe in the Benthamite principle of the �greatest good for the greatest number�: (a worthy principle in itself); they also believe not in the rule of law but in rule by law. We who cherish individual freedoms have to undergo the constraints and pangs of personal liberty constraints that do not obtain in the Peoples Republic of China.
Nehru’s vision of Indian democracy was definitely not �the greatest good of the greatest number�. But that has had its benefits even if �Three Gorges� would be impossible in India. If Nehru had subscribed to the Benthamite view of greatest good for the greatest member, he would have gone in for a Hindu State (as some of his compatriots wanted him to do) because the largest number of people in India are Hindus. But Nehru had vision. Hinduism to him was a civilisation not some dogma it was unthinkable to him that the majesty of a great religion could be confined to some narrow definition of Hindutva. Nehru’s vision of Indian democracy was the vastness and diversity of the country and the plurality of its peoples. Diversity in India began with its geography. Protected by natural barriers, the entire sub-continent was originally and historically a cul-de-sac; successive migratory waves of invaders were halted and intermingled with the indigenous residents to such an extent that radically distinct categories of people became hard to identify. Language and religion, rather than ethnic origin, became the distinguishing features of the myriad peoples of India.
This geographical diversity of India greatly impressed Panditji. You will find his vision in a great book called The Discovery of India. It greatly inspired students of my generation when we were in college. It was written in the quiet seclusion of a British prison in 1944 (during Nehru’s ninth term of imprisonment for revolting against the British). It is here that Jawaharlal Nehru contemplated �the variety and unity’ of India.
Nehru’s vision of Indian democracy approximated to that of E.M. Forster Forster who had visited the subcontinent was a bit critical of democracy and gave it only two cheers not the customary three. This is what he wrote: �So two cheers for democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism. Two cheers are quite enough: there is no occasion to give it three.�
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