Damaged republic: With Constitution hollowed out, India’s script goes awry

Farmers’ protests, tensions in India’s federal structure, spiralling anarchy in Manipur and the Union government’s response to each of these unprecedented situations suggest there is something very wrong with the State, and hence, the Indian Republic.

The nation went through similar upheavals after demonetisation, during the Covid pandemic, when China usurped our land. It’s likely this Sisyphean cycle is bound to repeat itself, with threats to the mosques in Varanasi and Mathura, among others.

The following is discernible. First, democratic institutions have been misused/pressurised to an unprecedented degree by the Union government, and so they are a shadow of their original selves and as intended by the Constitution (courts, Comptroller and Auditor General, Election Commission, Parliament, and worse, the civil service).

Second, India has never known such engineered religious divisiveness.

Third, this is an India where bureaucratic institutions (Enforcement Directorate, Central Bureau of Investigation, Income Tax department, police) have been freely used pre-election to intimidate Opposition leaders, to topple Opposition governments using threats.

Fourth, in 2014, the party already had governments in a few states (Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Goa and Chhattisgarh). It then “acquired” new states often by toppling existing Opposition-party led governments, and/or buying out Opposition leaders.

After announcing “cooperative federalism” as its goal, it worked tirelessly against the spirit of cooperative federalism and toppled 10 state governments in 9 years: Arunachal, Uttarakhand, Manipur, Meghalaya, Karnataka, Goa, Madhya Pradesh, Puducherry, twice in Maharashtra, and, recently, Bihar (‘palturam’ applies equally to BJP, not only Nitish Kumar); it excludes the failed attempts in Jharkhand and Delhi.

Fifth, the State has subjugated the electronic and print media with advertising into its Hindutva and propagandist agenda; never before had the media en masse been reduced to kneeling. Finally, never before had India abandoned a vision as articulated in five-year plans; the only vision the Centre offers is that of an X-trillion dollar economy.

The Great Manthan, a new book, maps how the Indian State has deviated from its constitutional raj dharma and the adverse social and political impacts of these deviations.

But it also goes beyond that and details why and how it has happened in the pursuit of partisan interests. For citizens, raising these issues becomes especially pertinent today, given the suspension of recent 143+ MPs from Parliament (a repeat of Gujarat Assembly suspensions earlier this century by the then CM of the entire Opposition several times).

It is appropriate to remind citizens of the many nationally implemented anti-people policies.

Demonetisation of 86% of India’s currency at four hours’ notice hit agriculture and 97% of non-farm enterprises (all in the unorganised sector, employing 90% of India’s workers), destroying livelihoods from which they have not recovered.

The Centre thus put India on a path of progressively slower growth for three years until 2020. Then a national lockdown (March 2020) at 4 hours’ notice, ramrodded without any debate, again destroyed livelihoods and contracted the economy by twice as much as the global economy in 2020.

A badly managed Covid pandemic killed 4.5 mn people in India, established by a series of national studies by serious scholars. However, the procedural crippling of the Election Commission and the concomitant abdication by the judiciary have not helped citizens to raise their voice.

Our ‘idea of India’ was founded upon the Constitution. However, we live in an India where Parliament passed an electoral bonds law that obviously avoids transparency on election funding (vis-à-vis the citizen while ensuring the State’s access to the contributor’s identity) but turns the tables on election funding against the Opposition.

The electoral bonds case was not heard by the SC for six years, and so were the petitions on a flawed EVM-based election method. Multiple changes made to EVMs since 2014 undermined citizens’ faith in EVMs (including a paper trail that counts only 2% of votes cast, not all votes cast). Only four other countries have EVM-based election voting and none with our serious technical flaws.

India is unique in the post-colonial world, in the fact that it has a Constitution that came into existence during independence, and one which has survived.

You will not find a single country (other than Costa Rica) in the global south, which in the last 75 years has held on to the constitution its founders gave it.

But our Constitution is being hollowed out (without overtly changing it) by a party that collects barely 37% (2019) of the votes polled. This party did not exist at independence and hence could neither contribute to its nationalist struggle nor to its Constitution.

Yet, it has its intellectual heritage in a ‘cultural nationalist’ organisation, which worked to support the British Raj, and believed at independence that the Manusmriti (founded upon the varna hierarchy) should form the basis of its Constitution, and the saffron flag, not the tricolour, should be the national flag.

By contrast, the Constitution was drafted by nationalists who were at the forefront of the nationalist struggle for over eight decades. The effort was led by a Dalit lawyer-economist whose knowledge and courage put him head and shoulders above even the tremendous collective intellect in the Constituent Assembly.

Thus, it is not without reason that while the Constitution has stood the test of time, other post-colonial states have succumbed to coups and counter-coups.

India is also unique in that it emerged from colonial ruin as a poor, largely illiterate country (18% literacy) but chose to adopt universal suffrage at its inception, and remained till 2014 not merely an electoral but an institutional democracy.

When our democracy is now being threatened from within (not from without), at such a time “silence becomes cowardice when occasion demands speaking out the whole truth and acting accordingly”, as Mahatma Gandhi reminded us.

(The author is Visiting Professor,
University of Bath, UK)