While It Rains Rose Petals

When I was a schoolkid in Delhi, Independence Day was Pandit Nehru’s day. Thousands went to the Red Fort, spontaneously, to hear him. And they came away with rose petals on their shoulders and on their thoughts. For the many who did not go to that iconic venue, it was also Panditji’s day. For he was on the airwaves. He made those waves. He was, in fact, the wave. Our home radio, that rectangular box with its green eye widening as the volume reached its fullness, seemed to wait for his Red Fort address. Each anniversary of our independence reminded us that India was in Panditji’s hands. And a more reassuring pair of hands there could not be.

Nineteen sixty-two seemed to change that. A new vulnerability gripped us after the defeat at China’s hands. Sharafat was seen as an error. To my teenage mind, though, Nehru had not gone wrong. He had been wronged. And sharif that he was, he was also strong enough to protect India’s dignity. My grandfather C. Rajagopalachari’s influence on my thinking was enormous, as such a grandfather’s would be. He was implacably opposed to what he perceived as Nehru’s Soviet-type planning under one-party rule. But Nehru, the man, was never the subject of Rajaji’s ire. The then octogenarian’s obituary tribute to the prime minister, “eleven years younger than I...”, dictated in Madras on the night of May 27, 1964, was the most moving I heard then or have, since.

There was that ‘something’ about the Nehru years which made them precious. Drawing a word from Panditji’s own masterful Hindustani, I have often asked myself: “What was the sifat of those times? What was its quality, its inner attribute, its essential nature, that made it so reassuring?” I think it was, quite simply, imaan. The trustworthiness that went with people and their word, their good faith, their honesty.

Imaan had, of course, marked the freedom movement. Each phase of that movement had its heroes and its heroines. Each had imaan. The Mahatma had set the climate that made the seasons of that noble and ennobling phase. Quite naturally, that quality went into the Constituent Assembly. And when that body of earnest men and women finished its work on the Constitution of India, it could be said to have been crafted by a collegium of architects, by the architects of the future of India for the owners of that future.

Today, six decades and 94 amendments later, who should we say upholds that great enactment, and for whom? Let us say that this is being done by a school of engineers. The rapture of a great design has been overtaken by the realities of maintenance. Does this mark a hardening? It certainly tells us that the timbre of our parliamentary functioning is being seasoned in vats of varying sifat and variegated imaan.

A decade ago, some decided that the time had come to review the Constitution. Speaking from the floor of the Central Hall of Parliament, President K.R. Narayanan said at that time, “Our Constitution has not failed us; we have failed the Constitution.” Why did he say we have failed the Constitution?

On the 62nd anniversary of India’s Independence, and in a year marked by our 15th general election, let me offer some reflections.

Elections are our pride; they are also a privation. They bring out the best in us; they also reveal the worst. They excite us; they exhaust us. They can, like a good monsoon, bring hope. They can, like a failed monsoon, bring gloom.

Elections generate faith. But who can deny that they have also generated, in not a few places, fear? Faith, in their power to reaffirm trust, or to reposition it. Fear, over their knack of uncorking violence, unleashing vendetta.

Pride & privation: That’s Indian elections. Sonia arrives in Allahabad in April 2009.

In an election, it is the candidate’s message or the party manifesto that is supposed to win the vote. And of course it does, aided by the prevailing mood or hawa. But, smiling in its sleeve, so does muscle. So does money. The election victories that are the progeny of intimidation are as undisguised as they are ugly.

No one can expect an election to be a convivial embrace. Adversarial positions have to be taken; that is what the hustings are about. But the debasement of contests into violent combats, with assault and murder accompanying them, is a different matter altogether.

No one can fight an election on good wishes. Expenses have to be incurred; they always have. But the flow of currency in elections has grown from a small stream into a muddy river in spate.

The great majority of our legislators win clean. They win within the lines of conduct drawn by the Election Commission of India. They convince their voters to vote for them, helped by the hawa of the day. But not a microscopic number win under a cloud.

Some victories over successive elections to the Lok Sabha and to our Vidhan Sabhas have been more embarrassing than defeats. Certain defeats have been more honourable than victories.

If elections exhaust and can be a privation, it is also because they sap one’s emotions. In many electoral contests, expletives oust argument, insults displace analysis. Dictionaries of abuse get coined, the etymologies of which are best left unexplored.

Panditji and Rajaji would have been outraged by all this, as would Jayaprakash Narayan and Acharya Kripalani.

As the seed, so the fruit.

If the imaan of the freedom struggle permeated the Constituent Assembly and the early legislatures, today’s elections bring all that is good in them and all that is not, to our legislatures. Naturally, Parliament has felt the need for an ethics committee.

Our democracy is hailed as the world’s largest. Size was the dinosaur’s best introduction. We need to think of our democracy’s sifat. And that includes our legislature’s interest in looking beyond the power-plays of democracy.

How much quality time has been spent by our legislators on the life-and-death issues raised by our endangered physical environment? Does the fact that our glaciers have shrunk dramatically, rivers across the country flow thin and our reservoirs hold half or even less than what they should, agonise lawmakers? Does the rising of sea levels which could see ‘climate refugees’ coming into our country, triggering altogether new concerns, take centrestage in debates? Does the phenomenon of rage, erupting over misgovernance every day in some part—or many parts—of the country every single day cause our democracy to introspect? ‘Business’ can no longer be ‘as usual’. And yet that is what it seems to be, for the corporate world, for the political class.

As a parliamentary democracy, India is altogether unique in the way it copes with its despondencies, its disappointments, its crises. I do not know of any other country which can alternate between crisis and catastrophe as ours does—and overcome the challenge. There are not many countries in the world that are plagued as ours is by terrorism—cross-border and home-grown. There are not many countries that have to face natural disasters, in which thousands are affected, like ours does. And there is no other example of one billion and more people of varying backgrounds—multi-lingual, multi-religious and, thanks to improved health services, multiplying—staying bonded in the spirit of democracy. Where else can we see the millennial advance made by a nation as ours has? And where else in the world can a government be bold enough to work towards that which would boggle the most developed nation: a unified identification number for each of its citizens?

Our Parliament and legislatures have given us a formidable body of legislation, the like of which can hardly be found anywhere. The last Lok Sabha has given us enactments which can reshape our national life. The National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, the Right to Information Act and the Act against Domestic Violence are not just pioneering, but epoch-making. They are the products of our parliamentary democracy, reflecting the deepest social introspection.

And yet.

Yes, and yet, that sense of pride dims even when we see the corruption and the violence that pervades our life, when we see the growing degradation of our environment, when we big-time users of precious resources go merrily on as if they live on a different plant, not our carbon-asphyxiated one. And when we see the plight of India’s vulnerable millions, especially its women. That is when the Nehru years, those rose-petalled Independence Days, seem, suddenly, like another country.

(The author is the governor of West Bengal.)