Electoral Reforms

This Republic Day, it's time we spared time to give a thought to what the Vice President has spoken in all his blessed wisdom. Blessed, because such pearls of wisdom come but rarely these days from people who matter in the body politic of India, or should I say the news makers. The Hon'ble VP has drawn attention to two important reforms in the electoral process of this country if we want democracy in India to acquire the instrumentalist role it should play in alleviating the misery of the people. He has talked of doing away with the first-past-the-post system and introducing the right to reject candidates as a means to making the legislative bodies truly representative and weeding out the virus of divisive electoral politics.

Fast-track Courts?

I am skeptical about the euphoria sought to be created around the launching of fast track courts. As long as the procedural law in India is not reformed, all attempts at speedy trials are foredoomed to failure. You could possibly have fast dispensation of justice in the early days, but as time will pass, the procedural law will catch up with it like weeds and retard its speed. The failure of consumer forums to provide speedy justice to hapless consumers is ample evidence of how procedural law can invade even quasi-judicial bodies such as consumer forums. On an average count, it could take at least a year before a complaint before a district consumer forum could reach the stage of arguments. This happens, because the people appointed to such bodies fail to recognize that consumer forums were deliberately designated as forums and not courts to rescue them from the procedural delays of the judiciary.

Quest for Truth

The poet, the philosopher, the scientist and the mystic have a common pursuit- the quest for Truth. Each pursues his/her passion according to his/her disposition. If the poet explores Truth with a leap of imagination, the philosopher probes it with reason. The scientist too uses reason to plumb the depths of Truth, but he/she distrusts speculative system building; (s)he would rather base his/her inferences on adequate observable data.  The mystic abandons the shore of reason to plunge into the seamless sea of the Unknown, with nothing to serve as a guidepost except utter surrender to the object of inquiry. The intimations of Truth that (s)he has are attributed, in popular parlance, to intuition.

In the historical trajectory of Time, empirical reason got privileged over other methods of inquiry. It got touted as the sole touchstone of Truth. While it would be wrong to run down the achievements of empirical reason for the modern industrial society and its sky-kissing artifacts are products of this mode of inquiry, it is an aberration all the same to privilege this mode of inquiry over the others. Long ago, Keats wrote very aptly, that in poetry, Imagination is the judge and Reason is in the dock. In other words, imagination breaks the barriers of the known systems, forms and structures of thought and life to look at life afresh with the eyes of a child and create new forms, new structures and new institutions of thought and life. Imagination plays a two fold function in the expression of Truth: metonymic and metaphorical. While the metonymic function is revealed in the sequence of events, the metaphorical function acts as the hidden organizing principle as well as vision, the poetic Truth, so to speak. Not surprisingly, many have spoken of the poetic Truth as being sovereign over the historical Truth. The apprehension of this Truth is facilitated by the Negation of the Self, as T. S. Eliot put it. In other words, the poet is not different from the mystic in as much as he too apprehends the Truth when he transcends/surrenders his self.

It is time this over-reliance on reason is corrected and other methods of inquiry are recognized and rehabilitated in popular consciousness.

The Great Churning

India is in the grip of the great churn once again. The other churn I refer to is the one of the freedom struggle. It helped to throw up a leadership which spearheaded the fight for independence of the country from the foreign yoke.

At the core of this successful resurgence of the country lay the spiritual revivalist efforts of great sons of the soil such as the ever-youthful Swami Vivekananda and the seer of a new Dawn, Sri Aurobindo. The spiritual revival of the country threw up enlightened individuals who made stellar contributions to the various aspects of our national life to quicken it once more with the urge to break free from the shackles of a moribund past. As a result, the political life of the nation witnessed the emergence of stalwarts like Gandhi, Nehru, Gokhale, Tilak, Sardar Patel, and scores of individuals, all fired with one zeal, the passion to liberate India. All resonated to one mantra, the mantra of Indian nationalism.

On account of the spiritual underpinning of this struggle, Indian nationalism never turned jingoistic. It respected the right of the others to co-exist with the emergent nation-state of free India. It did not even harbour any ill will or revenge against the invaders of the past or the imperialists. Rightly so, it adopted the path of peaceful struggle and partnership with the then imperialist power.

Within the nation, it steered clear of any petty communal agenda by adopting secularism as a creed, though the independence of the country was marred with the emergence of the communal virus, that gave birth to the ever-unstable state of Pakistan. The all-universal and eternal spiritual core of India prevented the Indian leadership, though largely Hindu, from espousing the thesis of the two-nation theory by rejecting the thought of turning the nation into a 'Hindu' state as opposed to the Islamic Pakistan. Such a course would have run counter to the eternal and universal message of the Veda that speaks of the transcendental and the immanent Divine as the basis of this great Creation in all its infinite variety of colours, forms and creeds, suiting each community and individual. Besides, we need to remember anything engendered in hatred also succumbs to the apoptosis of hatred. The instability of Pakistan as a nation state is a case in point.

The fervour of freedom however subsided once it was gained. In the new found freedom of choice open to all individuals in the nation, at least at the notional level, freedom soon turned into license for the rich and the powerful to rape and plunder the nation and the vast hapless majority of its rich resources. The brazen display of power that the media has unmasked in recent times has proved right what the Mahatma said long ago that there is enough in Nature for everyone's need, but not enough for one man's greed. And here we have had not one but a sizable number of power-hungry and money-mongering individuals aggrandizing their personal wealth by looting the Kuber ka Khazana, the national exchequer and the national resources, mindless of the fact that you cannot hew the branch on which you are perched.

Yet, this unabashed display of power and pelf is not unlike the poison that the sagar manthan of yore produced before the amrita of peace and resurgence could emerge. So, my appeal to all pessimists, please have patience. The histories of nations do not get fashioned at a pace at which individual lives get transformed. I foresee the bottoming out of the trough of decay and decadence in the country's culture at all levels, individual as well as 'communal' (in the sense of the community), and the rise of the curve of integrity and harmony, and thus, progress.

We must remember the lotus blooms in the muddy pool and the lily blooms on a dung-hill. The seeds of this resurgence are visible not just in the emergence of an activist civil society but also the assertion of right thinking individuals in the corridors of power.