Hakim-e-sukhan der zubaan aafarein
Wise One, speech creating in the tongue!
This conclave on ‘Violence Free Transition to Transformation’ begs a number of critical questions: What is meant by transition, why is its necessity? How is it to be undertaken? Why is violence apprehended? What should be the ingredients of the transformed new being?
It is evident that the discussion has been is about change.
It is manifest that an evolving world is a world of change. We therefore need to consider its phenomenology. Change can be paradoxical; things change yet remains the same. It implies time and necessitates a distinction between its essential and accidental properties. Our discussion is as much about the philosophy of change as of its modalities in the context of India. Some of these have been highlighted in the presentations.
Why is this needed?
The founding fathers of the Republic gave us a Constitution spelling out both the national ideals and the institutions and processes by which to achieve it. The ideals were national unity and integrity and a democratic and equitable society to be achieved through a socio-economic revolution. Thus unity, social revolution and democracy became the ‘three strands of a seamless web.’
Underlying the constitutional scheme is the concept of the Rule of Law defined as absolute supremacy of regular law, equality before the law, and access to justice through judiciary. Its objective, as Prof. Upendra Baxi put it, is to make power accountable, governance just and state ethical.
What is our score card?
Physical unity has been achieved but emotional integration remains work in progress with serious challenges on the periphery and in the least attended segments of our people. Similarly, electoral democracy on the FPTP pattern is a reality but substantive democracy, as Ambedkar visualized it, is elusive. As for social change, it can only be described as patchy in a society of immense diversity and complexity having deep-rooted vertical and horizontal fissures. Human development indices give us a low ranking globally and present a dismal picture.
We have to admit that self correctives by the institutions of the state are not forthcoming in sufficient measure since each of them has been afflicted by cancerous growth within.
The end result is that the de jure “We, the people” in the first line of the Preamble is in reality a fragmented ‘we’ divided by yawning gaps that remain to be bridged.
Many years back the late George Verghese had written about ‘India’s multitudinous but hitherto dormant diversities’ coming to life and the need for the delicate task of managing this diversity within multiple transitions.
Is there a talisman in our vast repertoire of wisdom?
Yes, it is to be found on the first page of the Constitution and in three expressions: Justice, Equality and Fraternity. The first induces the second and the third becomes meaningless without them. Justice as John Rawls said is the first virtue of social institutions and ‘in a just society the liberties of equal citizenship are taken as settled and the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests.’
Fraternity is the bulwark against two pervasive evils in our society, caste prejudice and religious intolerance. Both have deep roots in social practice and are sought to be reinforced by doctrines of assimilation and inclusiveness aimed at diluting and erasing the diversity of our society. These harmful homogenizing ventures, and the social prejudices engineered through them, result in exclusion and alienation and in creating images of the Other. They have induced a crisis of fraternity that we ignore at our peril.
The need of the hour is to move beyond rhetoric and ritual commitments to the promotion in practice of fraternity; the need also is to go beyond mere tolerance to the actual acceptance of the so-called ‘other’. Anything short of that would be sophistry.
If socio-economic transformation is attempted devoid of these three principles, resistance including violent resistance would be unavoidable. Constitutional imperatives, prudent statecraft, and practical common sense demand that these be the litmus test of every agenda of change.
Jai Hind.