DEMOCRACY?EAST IS EAST AND WEST IS WEST!

America and India: the best Vs the biggest

It is less than a year since George W Bush Jr took over as the Most Powerful Person on Planet Earth. Even before he had settled down in White House, two reports appeared in the press, one after the other- his daughter had been punished by the courts for purchasing liquor, claiming to be an adult, which she was not! That alone is reason enough for one to admire the American democracy (read society, if you will). At the same time, just imagine the insensitivity of raining bombs on an even-otherwise devastated country like Afghanistan and killing innocents by the thousands, irrespective of age, sex or culpability, and dismissing the whole thing as collateral damages! But viewed from the narrow perspective of nationalism can the American attitude be faulted? Definitely not! Contrast that with India- the worlds largest democracy! Really, can we even recognise any semblance of democracy in this country except for the fact that some people are driven to cast votes periodically?

Games the Rich Nations Play

When you have to compare two societies what do you exactly compare? History? Culture? Per capita income? Or, in simpler terms, the quality of life? The United Nations has listed the social development factors and one state, Kerala, in India is supposed to be rated fairly high on these indices. A Keralite myself, I have my doubts if it is not a ruse by the US of A, the real face behind the UN mask, to play patron and fish in troubled waters. Kerala, which has the dubious distinction of having elected a communist government to power, being ranked a front-ranking state in an otherwise mismanaged and apparently developing country, by the greatest capitalist country itself! Isnt it actually the US of A patting itself on the back as a true leader who can see things for what they are, without favour or rancour?

They will call the shots because they can

Well, there seems to be an implicit acceptance that the West is materialistic and developed and the East, with the exception of Japan, is mystical and (forever!) only developing. Can there be a greater distortion of facts? Definitely, there are certain areas where the West, led, obviously, by the America, is ahead of the rest, including the East. Fortunately for them and unfortunately for the rest, the area of marketing themselves and their products seems to be one where they seem to dominate, head over shoulders! Or why should it be that the Indians should be running around to get an American patent for Basmati rice or turmeric or neem cancelled? As Bharatratna Dr A P J Abdul Kalam remarked- only strength respects strength. May be he also meant that strength respects only strength. The truism in both cannot be dismissed.

Complacency or Ostrich-like approach never pays

The great scientist also asked- we lack the self-confidence to see ourselves as a developed nation, self-reliant and self-assured; isn't this incorrect? Yes and no. Yes, because we have what it needs to be a developed, self-reliant and self-assured nation. And no, because, whether it was Nehru running to the UN seeking a solution to the Kashmir problem or Atal Bihari

Vajpayee bending over backwards, offering help to the US of A, to nab Osama Bin Laden, the basic issue is the same- lack self-confidence! May be only at the political leadership level; but ancient wisdom says jaisa raja vaisa praja and in a democracy, every people get the government they deserve!

Destined to be exploited without the colonial yoke too?

That the nation was divided to please the architect of modern India is now part of history. To compound a crisis, Mahatma Gandhi, a true leader and a visionary, rightly wanted the Congress Party to be disbanded so that its fair name was not tarnished by self-seeking individuals. Nehru would have none of that. And so, inspite of the fact that the leaders who took part in the freedom struggle got themselves distributed in various parties, postindependence, Nehru managed to corner all the glory of the party that led (I repeat, LED) the country to freedom. While the rules regarding trademarks prohibit people, other than the owners of a particular trademark, from using anything even resembling that trademark, the Congress Party, under Mr Nehru, also managed to retain the tricolor as their party flag. After all, how much is the chakra different from the charka, discernibilty-wise atleast? To add insult to injury, we also have Mr Nehru changing the surname of his Parsi son-in-law, Feroze, from Gandhey to Gandhi. The English language gives a lot of leeway in spelling proper nouns and in the bargain if people can be confused into believing there is a Mahatma Gandhi connection, lineage-wise, to his progeny, why not? And by blaming an entire party for the crime of one man, Nehru decimated the only viable opposition he could have had then. So was born the dynasty in a democratic country. But did anybody realise then that democracy itself had been given a silent burial? I doubt how many realise it even today!

Faltering right from the word Go!

We, the people of India.give to ourselves this Constitution wrote the architects of our Constitution, the most voluminous document of its kind in the world. The preamble sets out the main objectives of the Constitution. It is a legitimate aid in the construction of the provisions of the Constitution. And what does the preamble promise? To secure to all its citizens: Justice, social, economic and political; liberty of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship; equality of status and opportunity; and to promote among them all, fraternity, assuring the dignity of the individual and the unity and integrity of the nation. And after more than half a century of its existence how much of this promise has been fulfilled? Our political leaders, master deceptors that they are, may claim that 50 years is too short a period in the history of any nation. One need to only point out at Japan (though geographically in the East, by all other means it is with the West, isnt it?) and Germany to call their bluff. Also compare the natural wealth of this great country with the impoverished Japan and any sane citizen will be shocked at the mess that our political leaders have made of this nation.

Crumbling pillars of our Constitution

Legislature and Executive. To blame the politician alone will be unfair. In fact, I, for one, still consider him a shade better than the members of the other two organs of our democracy- the executive and the judiciary. Theoretically speaking, all these organs are supposed to be independent and expected to provide necessary checks and balances in wielding power. However, though the politician has practically succeeded in making his will prevail over the

other two, he remains the only one with some accountability for his actions too. Atleast once in five years he has to get back to the people and explain to them his conduct and contributions to the society. The head of the executive, The President of the Union, is almost dismissed as a rubber stamp! And the administrators under him have been reduced to being His Masters Voices! Or is it so? When Mr Ram Jethmalani was a Union Minister he went ahead and ordered that the records in his ministry be made available to the public for scrutiny and also that they could get a copy for a nominal fee. This happened long before the Right to Information Act was first discussed and, as usual with such laws that tend to bring transparency and accountability in the administration, was silently put in cold storage. It was reported in the press that the Ministers orders were left confined to the paper it was written on because his Secretary got the Cabinet Secretary to issue directions that the ministers orders need not be complied with till the Right to Information Act was passed! Yes, our bureaucrats in administration are not all that innocent. In fact, they are having the best of both worlds. Authority without accountability, power without responsibility! Their mindset is still the same as that of the government employee of the colonial era, but they now have the added advantage of remaining in the shadows of their political bosses and pulling the strings from behind, to serve their own selfish ends. There are exceptions like Alphonse Kannanthanam, Sukumar Oommen, and Arun Bhatia. But they remain exceptions. The very fact that they have risen to the positions where they are today should be seen as the Lord Almightys small little mercies for the oppressed of this country. The system certainly is with the devil. Judiciary. But even the administration is a shade better when compared to our judiciary! Justice delayed is justice denied is a maxim that one learnt in the primary school. So imagine the state of affairs when even under-trials are left languishing in jails for 30 or more years. When even a life-convict is expected to be kept in jail for only 14 years or less, just imagine the horror of spending so many years in jail as an under-trial in a case where the maximum punishment could be just a few months! Here is a report by Swaminathan A Aiyer Three liquidation cases in the Calcutta High Court remained pending for more than 50 years. And India can boast of the longest legal dispute in history- a land dispute in Maharashtra lasted 650 years! If no new case at all are registered, says Debroy, the courts will take 324 years to dispose of the backlog at the current rate of clearance. And this, when only 50 percent of the population is literate and the majority of the population is simply worried where their next meal is going to come from! Agreed that, as usual, resources needed are far more than what is available. But to accept that and rest the case would be nothing but a fraud. And this is what Justice V R Krishna Iyer has written in Justice and Beyond: Why, in Gandhian India, are sentencing provisions and practices sadistic and retributive, judges and administrators dismissing as hawkish muck therapeutic and corrective alternatives? When do we hope to modernize, humanise and democratise our legal system and tune it upto to Third World conditions? Rule of Law not Rule of Judges. The mainstay of any civilized society, leave alone a democracy, is the rule of the law. For any law to be effective it should, first of all, be simple, clear and unambiguous. The affected people should understand it and imbibe it in letter and spirit. The need to go to courts to get interpretations for each and every clause certainly doesnt speak well of the competence of our legislators. And worse, when the judiciary interprets the same law to mean different, sometimes even contradictory, things under different contexts, the public can only get confused and confounded, as they are now. In this context it would be worth recalling that confusion had prevailed even in recognising the

preamble of our Constitution as an integral part of it! In 1961, the Supreme Court had observed that the preamble is not part of the Constitution, but in 1973, it held that the preamble of the Constitution was part of the Constitution and the observations to the contrary in Berubari Union case were not correct! Our present Union Minister for Disinvestment, Mr Arun Shourie, has done yeomen service in compiling a number of intriguing cases in a book titled Courts and their judgements. At the function held to release the book he also made a tongue-in-cheek suggestion: that there should be a group of scholars reviewing all sensitive rulings of the higher courts so that the judges were also careful that their judgements were subjects to scrutiny! And this is what Ms Arundhati Roy, Booker-prize winner, has said: the process of the trial and all that it entails, is as much, if not more of a punishment than the sentence itself.

Education to usher in a Second Freedom Struggle

The way things are, there is definitely a need for a second freedom struggle. However, it is doubtful if Mahatmajis methods would succeed today. The solution is in education, the aims of which, according to Shri Bhanu Pratap Mehta, are: provision of a general intellectual training, acquisition of appropriate skills to acquire or use information and inculcating a healthy skepticism in students towards received facts. Let us not forget that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty and that an alert citizen is essential for the success of democracy. So, as an alert citizen, what do you find? Re-write the Constitution not just amend it. Beginning with the Constitution itself, the rulebooks have to be re-written. Fortunately, the need for this is well understood even by the powers that be. So there is a Constitution Review Commission studying our Constitution in detail and is expected to recommend the changes that are needed to be incorporated. But the way it has been going about doing its business and the cry for blood coming from certain powerful quarters, one needs to be wary whether the task will be performed satisfactorily. Considering that the present Constitution was documented at a time when patriotic feelings ran high and so many intricacies were glossed over, it is no wonder that there is a lot of infirmity in it. (Imagine the Speaker of the Lok Sabha calling a special meeting to draft a code of conduct for our MPs and MLAs in the 50th year of the Constitutions existence!) So there is need to understand where things had gone wrong and suggest workable remedies. Unfortunately, it is with these workable remedies that there could be problems and the usual tendency is to let sleeping dogs lie. That would render the whole exercise futile. Further, the present Constitution was drawn up by a handful of leaders of the independence struggle. For all their good intentions and integrity, there was a certain limit to their grasp of the requirements, and to their ability to articulate them freely to a larger audience, maximise inputs and arrive at better solutions. The story is different today. The experiences of 50 years and the reach of the media need to be harnessed for getting inputs from a wider cross-section of the population and a better Constitution drafted to spell out the objectives and means for the next fifty years. Unfortunately, even the media has not fully woken up to its responsibilities so far, in this context. Out, party-based democracy; In, real democracy. It is a fact that party-based democracy itself has failed in this country. So will the Presidential system, as in the US of A, work in our context? No guarantee, there. But cant we think afresh, keeping in mind the lessons we have learnt from our own experiences in the past fifty years? Shouldnt we tailor our solutions to

suit our problems? Here is one suggestion: Our government should function at three levels. Villages should form the units of administration. Villages should be linked through computer networks to the next level of governance, that is the State. States should be linked to the government at the Center. Polls should be conducted to elect representatives to an Electoral College (EC). These representatives, Members of Electoral College (MEC) can be one per 500 or 1000 of the population, but should necessarily be one amoung them. MECs from the village will function as the Village Panchayat (VP). The VP will send a representative from amoung them to the State Legislature (SL) on need basis. This need will be decided by the agenda before the Legislature and the competence of the MEC to address the issues in the agenda. The agenda, of course, will be circulated by the State Secretariat well in advance so that the issues are discussed thoroughly at the VP and every VP can send its best spokesperson for the occasion to the SL. A similar exercise can follow for issues at the national level taken up for consideration in the Parliament. Of necessity, the discussions should start at the VP, ensuring the best democratic process at work always. And there shall never be defections and toppling of governments for the five years for which each Electoral College shall function! Person-centered courts Vs Democracy-oriented jury. In the context of the judiciary too radical reforms are needed, both structurally and functionally. Firstly, it has to become accessible. For the short term, there can be more fast track courts, time-sharing the available resources and supplementing them where needed. In other words, the courts should work in shifts, using the present infrastructure and adding on minimum essentials like judges, clerks and storage space for the documents? For the long term, there is a need to evolve a system where a jury, comprising of atleast three law-qualified personnel listen to cases directly from the litigants and the witnesses, including the investigating personnel, and give their judgements. A jury can be constituted at the Village Panchayat itself, drawing on the resources from within the panchayat or employing them from outside, if need be. The system of litigants employing advocates should be done away with if justice is to be made accessible and fair. To streamline the process, one member each from the jury may be made responsible for recording the statements of the complainant(s) and respondant(s) and studying them in depth. Who is recording what should be known only to the jury and not to anybodyelse, to prevent extraneous influences being effective. All examinations/ cross-examinations should be done by the Presiding Officer of the Jury and any question that any other member needs to ask should be routed through the Presiding Officer only. The punishment should include cost of the jury in real terms and should be realised from the judgement debtor. Where the judgement debtor is poor, he has to be sent to prison and the cost recovered through his labour. India: The Orwellian Animal Farm? Here is a quote from George Bernard Shaw- You will never find an Englishman in the wrong. He fights you on patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles; he enslaves you on imperialistic principles. Objectively speaking, our people who have been wielding any power of the state, since independence, seem to be no different. When there was a hue and cry in our media, about starvation deaths taking place in the country at a time when food grains were rotting in government godowns, there was also the report that some leaders had come out with the preposterous suggestion that mango kernels had enough nutrients to sustain lives and since it was available in sufficient quantities all the reports were concocted! Now consider also the two cases- one that happened in 1984, with the national capital as the epicenter, and the other one that happened in 1991, at distant Sriperumpudur in Tamilnadu. In the former, thousands of men of the Sikh community were

murdered in cold blood, even in broad daylight, in the open streets in residential areas and busy markets; and almost 20 years after the crime not even a single person has been convicted. In the latter, an ex-prime minister, whose party had been routed in the earlier elections, had been murdered by a suicide bomber, destroying with her whatever traces of evidence that could have been there to track the crime. In less than 10 years, 28 persons were convicted and sentenced to death. Same country, same systems; only the clout of the victims mattered in guiding the course of justice. Did George Orwell foresee the shape of things to come in this country when he wrote his Animal Farm and declared that all animals are equal but some are more equal than the others? Permit me to quote one more example to substantiate my argument that our whole system needs to be overhauled, if the objectives listed in the preamble to our Constitution need to be realised. This is in the context of the segregation of minority handicrafts at the India International Trade Fair at Delhi. This is how the editorial in the New Indian Express read- The most charitable view of the segregation of minority handicrafts at the ongoing IITF in New Delhi is that there is nothing more than meets the eye in the decision. If on the other hand, it is part of a new policy, no words are strong enough to condemn it. Nor does the segregation become less questionable because it was the brainwave of the National Minorities Development and Finance Corporation, set up for the welfare of the minorities. Yes, whether wittingly or otherwise, in fifty years of freedom and democracy the only one lesson we seem to have learnt is to segregate and segregate and continue with the divide and rule strategy we used to accuse our colonial masters of. We need to unlearn this fissiparous habit and learn to get integrated. And geography has no part in this. It has to come from within all of us and from within us only. And it can be achieved only through proper education. The rest will follow.

Awake, Arise and rest not till

So we come full circle. Back to America, where an act of indiscretion involving an intern led to a President almost losing his job. We have a good proportion of seats in our legislatures, and even parliament, occupied by criminals. We even have an ex-justice of the Supreme Court justifying her decision to let a criminal be her own prosecutor! And the people who are the sovereign entities of this socialist, democratic republic are condemned to suffer in silent agony their Constitution being ripped apart by all those tasked to uphold and protect it! East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet- that is until the basic needs of a democratic society are met. Here, we need to add to Maslows list of basic needs- food, sex, clothing and shelter- one more: education! Education that enables one to discern between right and wrong and education that gives one the courage of conviction to stand up to what is right and, equally importantly, oppose what is wrong. Since most of us believe in the power of prayers, permit me to conclude by quoting a prayer: Oh, Lord! Give me the courage to change the things I can, the serenity to accept the things I cant and the wisdom to differentiate between the two. P M Ravindran 2/18, Aathira Kalpathy-678003 06 Mar 2002

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