The rather desultory discussions on the proposed constitutional changes so far have not produced and are not likely to produce anything like a consensus. Indeed, apart from the CPI and the ADMK, other opposition parties have even questioned the right of the present Parliament to undertake the exercise on the ground that it had completed its normal term last March. But amidst the diversity of opinions what stands out is the interesting fact that the political elite here remains dependent on the liberal-democratic framework and that it is unable to turn elsewhere for guidance.
This is not to say that the country can or will return to the constitutional-political arrangements as they existed before the promulgation of the national emergency on June 25, 1975, nor to suggest that the restoration of the status quo ante will by itself enable the nation to grapple with the problems it faces. The suggestion is that despite all reservations, no significant section of the political elite in the country is able to think outside the liberal-democratic framework.
OBVIOUS
The point is obvious enough as far as the Congress Party and its leaders are concerned. They have had no other frame of reference and are not likely to find any other for the simple reason that they cannot possibly turn to Marxism-Leninism which can be said to be the only other available ideological-political framework. One-party and no-party states are a fact of life in much of Asia, Africa and Latin America. But they lack respectable intellectual ancestry and are therefore unlikely to find much acceptance among the Indian political elite.
The surprise, if any, is that despite all its talk of revolution, Marxism-Leninism, dictatorship of the proletariat, the Left, too, has fallen back on the liberal democratic framework, the only exception being the extremist fringe groups popularly known as the Naxalites.
This view is likely to be contested by both the CPI and the CPM. But their objections cannot stand careful scrutiny.
The CPI does not, of course, care very much for the judiciary or its right under the present dispensation either to review the constitutional validity of Central and state legislations or to enforce the Fundamental Rights. On the contrary, it has consistently taken the stand that the Supreme Court has no right to pronounce on the validity of Acts passed by Parliament and that the powers of the judiciary have lent themselves to abuse by the propertied classes to perpetuate the iniquitous status quo and to frustrate socio-economic reforms meant to uplift the downtrodden. But when certain proposals were mooted last winter to increase the powers of the executive, possibly at the expense of the legislature, the CPI leadership was alarmed, and ever since it has used every opportunity to underscore the need to assure and protect the sovereignty of Parliament and the answerability of the Prime Minister and the Council of Ministers to it.
The CPI’s may well be a lopsided view. For, it is possible to argue that the existing constitutional balance between the executive, the legislature and the judiciary cannot be upset in one direction, that is against the judiciary, without it being upset against the legislature as well. But that is a different proposition altogether. The pertinent point in the present context is that the CPI regards what in its jargon is a bourgeois institution as an adequate instrument for protecting and promoting the rights of the common people. And however much it may protest, it just cannot explain its faith in the efficacy of Parliament except in terms of the liberal-democratic framework, if not the value system.
The party leadership claims that it remains committed to the cause of revolution. But the removal of the right to property from among the Fundamental Rights is the most important constitutional change it has been advocating all these months when it should know as well as anyone else that the government already possesses all the powers it needs to take over a property or industry and fix the compensation at whatever level it deems fit. In plain terms, the CPI has been indulging in empty rhetoric. Indeed, if its platform of unity with the Congress means anything, it is willing to modify greatly, if not altogether abandon, its earlier insistence on extra-parliamentary activities as the principal agent of social change.
IMPOSSIBLE
The CPM has gone even further. A statement issued by it and the representatives of six other Left groups on May 28 said: “It is not possible to accept the Swaran Singh Committee’s argument for curtailing the powers of the judiciary… The Left parties cannot agree to entrust to Parliament any absolute power to amend the Constitution without the Supreme Court having any power to scrutinise whether the amendment is in accordance with the basic structure of the Constitution… The committee’s recommendation that power to pronounce on the vires of laws should be taken away from High Courts will result in leaving the citizen at the mercy of the executive.”
Again, the point is not whether the objections to the proposed constitutional changes are valid or not but that they are rooted in the liberal democratic tradition which the CPM and its allies have otherwise been denouncing day in and day out. And this fact is sought to be brought out with a view to demonstrating not the fickleness of the CPM’s commitment to revolution of the Marxist-Leninist variety but the hold of the liberal-democratic framework on the mind of the political elite, including the Left, here.
This is not surprising, though it might appear to be so on a surface view. For, whether one likes it or not the political elite in this country is the product of a Western-style educational system and it has been brought up on liberal-democratic values, whatever changes these may suffer in actual practice.
Thus in conceptual terms, not only socialism but also communism here are an extension and not a repudiation of the liberal legacy. Their proponents, specially the Communists, may not, indeed often do not, see things that way. But whenever they are confronted with a crisis, as the United CPI was in the early ‘fifties in the wake of the suppression of the Telengana uprising and the CPM has been for some years, they raise the banner of civil liberty, not revolution. They seek an amelioration and not an aggravation of the crisis despite their professed adherence to the path shown by Lenin.
REALITY
This is clearly not fortuitous. On the contrary, it represents the deeper reality which is that modern as distinct from scripture-based traditional education and neither class conflict nor the inter-action between various castes has been the principal instrument of social change and political development in the country. The well-educated Indians may or may not constitute a separate caste as some leading sociologists like Mr. Dumont think they do. But without doubt they have been and remain the main motivating force in Indian society.
This is best illustrated by the fact that leaders of all movements, organisations come more or less from similar social and economic background and that there has not arisen in the country what can properly be described as a revivalist movement. Even the short-lived Ramrajya Parishad depended more on the support of former princes in Rajasthan, the only state where it was active, than on its founder, Swami Karpatri’s religion-based appeal to the common people. It is also indicative of the Indian social reality that, despite the persistent and widespread criticism of the education system ever since independence and even before and its well known weaknesses, very little has been done to change it.
Under the proposed 10+2+3 system, a vocational bias is sought to be given to education at the school level. But it will not change its basic character. In any case, all attempts to establish anything like an indigenous system of education have failed.
This is not to suggest that caste and class are not factors in Indian politics. They clearly are. But they are subordinate to the forces released by the spread of modern education, however deplorable its quality. From this, it does not follow that educated youth can defy the system at will and push it in any direction they like. Other factors apart, they are too heterogeneous a group to attempt anything like that except in certain exceptional circumstances. But they alone define the broad parameters within which Indian polity moves.
The Times of India, 18 August 1976