Saturday, October 2, 2010

A Vital and Essential Step for Emergence of a New India

In the freedom struggle waged on the principle of nonviolent passive resistance, it was made clear by its charismatic leader Mahatma Gandhi that the struggle was aimed at removing the oppressive and degrading system of governance designed and used by the British Government to systematically exploit India which was their colony. He emphasized that the struggle was not necessarily aimed at driving out the British people in the Indian government or living in India.
When India was granted freedom through Independence of India Act 1947 passed by the British Parliament, it was specified therein that the Govt. of India Act 1935, under which colonial India was governed, would remain in force till the Constituent Assembly of India framed its own Constitution. However, as discussed in my April 24, 2010 post under the previous Blog, the Constituent Assembly was constituted in 1946 by the British Indian Government under Cabinet Mission Plan which resulted in a Constituent Assembly dominantly representing those sections of Indian people which were beneficiaries of the colonial system of governance and dreaded the system of governance constantly advocated by Gandhi and thus had a vested interest in the status quo. Leaders of the masses of India, who were inspired by Gandhi’s ideas of governance for free India were in abject minority in the Constituent Assembly. Gandhi himself was rendered irrelevant and was totally neglected in the exercise of making the Constitution which was to determine the future course of free India. Gandhi, the architect of India’s freedom who died before this exercise ended was betrayed, the masses who looked up to the freedom of India for deliverance from their sufferings were short-changed and freedom was hijacked by Macaulay’s children who prevailed in this exercise, resulting in a Constitution which had all the trappings of a modern Constitution but its operative core remained the Govt. of India Act 1935. Thus, the journey that the Indian republic began on 26 January 1950 was off-track from day one. The problems that were created and exacerbated in the course of its six decades of journey are all before us to see and suffer from. This off-track journey of the Indian republic has been discussed in my blog-post dated 15 August 2010. The moot point is whether there will be any deliverance from the sufferings the people of India are subjected to on account of abysmally low level of morality of contemporary Indian politics and politicians, corruption at all levels of government, poverty and increasing marginalization of the poor due to widening gap between the rich and the poor, and social unrest and insurgency. All our endeavours made in the past to deal with these problems in isolation have utterly failed. In fact, these problems have been systematically getting more and more serious over time in spite of these endeavours. If the basic illness afflicting a human body or body politic is not diagnosed and treated, treatments of its diverse symptoms in isolation are bound to fail. And that has been the experience in India over the last 60 years. So, in order to rid India of the serious problems sapping the vitality of the nation, we have to strike at the basic illness, i.e., the colonial system of governance that sneaked into our Constitution due to the machinations of the British government in complicity with the vested interests of India, and replace it with a system which Mahatma Gandhi constantly advocated throughout the freedom struggle spearheaded by him, and which accords with our aspirations of India being a “democratic, socialist, secular, sovereign republic” declared in our Constitution but achieved only in illusions, not in reality. What is this system, how it can be put in place, a vision of India with this system in place, who will do it and related questions will be addressed in my subsequent posts under this Blog.