Keeping the republic - by Suhas Palshikar
Benjamin Franklin is
said to have made this observation on the American constitution: “A republic if
you can keep it”. It was as much a comment on ability as it was on intent.
Republics are easy to form; they are difficult to sustain. Republics can be
sustained in a formal manner more easily than they can be sustained in their
content. A majority of the countries claim to be republics but republicanism
eludes many of them.
Like every year, the
Republic Day this year too would be full of a display of India’s cultural
heritage and military might. Cities and states will compete with each other to
raise the mast higher to hoist the flag. But the Franklin poser could still not
be easily avoided. Our founding fathers gave us a republican constitution but
all they could hope was that a civic virtue, necessary for republicanism to
strike roots, would be cultivated by the recipients of the benefits of the
republic.
Dr Ambedkar warned
that “however good a constitution may be, it is sure to turn out bad because
those who are called to work it, are a bad lot”. He did not refer merely to
elected representatives or the “rulers”, but to the incomplete project of
transforming people into citizens. Therefore, Republic Day, just as it brings
celebrations and pronouncements of pride in the might of the state, exhorts us
to introspect on the fragile republican culture that would undercut the formal
edifice of the republic. At least four core challenges to the idea of republic
can be identified.
The first concerns the
distortions of democracy. Among the more glaring, we can list majoritarianism,
rise of vigilantism and institutional corrosion. As democracy gets converted
into shows of numerical strength, the capacity to negotiate and deliberate
drowns under the noise of numbers. This trait gives way to an anarchic
articulation of vigilantism by protectors of various causes, rejecting the idea
of rule of law. Both a cause and an effect of this is the all-round corrosion
of institutions. It would be tough to identify institutions that continue to
enjoy and consolidate confidence in their institutional practices and in their
capacity to deliver. There is an inter-institution competition to display their
flair for failure. From media to military and from administration to
adjudication, we seem to be witnessing non-performance, transgressions,
disconnects or betrayals. The republic is besieged with misplaced cultural
priorities, bragging generals and brawling judges. The republic crumbles when
statesmanship stops at showmanship, politics breeds fear and institutions fail
to strengthen norms and procedures.
The second challenge
pertains to citizenship itself. As Ambedkar presciently warned, caste and
community intervene in the shaping of citizenship. Seven decades down the line,
the fortresses of community have become more impenetrable. In today’s India,
nobody can criticise, comment or censure the practices of “another” community
of which she is not part. On the other hand, insiders can only uphold and
celebrate the practices and symbols of the community. Communities are beyond
debate and criticism; they exist as sacred and protected enclaves where outsiders
are barred from entry (save for glorification) and members are imprisoned
inside.
Relations among
communities are also marked by mutual suspicion. This is not confined only to
Hindu-Muslim relations; even among castes, relations are, more often than not,
competitive. The violence a few years ago between the Gurjjars and Meenas or
the violence during the Jat agitation in Haryana are cases in point. Religious
minorities are vulnerable to riots and pogroms, Adivasis face repression from
expanding capitalism and Dalits continue to be subjects of humiliation and
violence from upper and middle castes. As a result, individuals are unable to
transcend their group identity or link their group identity to their identity
as citizens. Caste-community based separation, suspicion and violence ensure
that the idea of citizenship becomes a chimera. Rather than pursuing the agenda
of social justice, caste action often culminates in consolidating identities,
constructing symbols and creating boundaries made from cultural universes.
In this situation, it
is near impossible that any idea of common or public good would emerge and
sustain. So, the third challenge emerges from the absence of a shared vision of
what constitutes public good. Communities are so clearly separated that each
entertains a separate notion of what constitutes the “public” and therefore,
what public good is. Given the fragmentation of the public and impossibility of
common good, all politics and policymaking takes the form of a cynical exercise
of balancing competing expectations. But the more serious casualty in this
process is the loss of the idea of commonwealth which is at the core of a
republic.
Finally, our republic
suffers from the inability to evolve public reason. Legislatures fail to
debate; television debates have become notorious for their decibel capacity
rather than deliberative power; nothing debatable can be presented in
textbooks; academic seminars are monitored for who the participants will be;
attacking meetings of rival viewpoints is a common political act; banning works
of art, literature, and academic value is the national passion across the
political spectrum. Demands by almost every social section often lack in
legitimacy. If communities could be imagined as persons, we might equate ourselves
to the Hobbesian situation of being utterly limited in our view of
self-interest. So, the problem is not merely the inability to evolve procedures
and terms of debate, it is about foreclosing the possibility of debate because
we are unwilling to accept that the nation is the common property of all
citizens.
Obviously, republics
are not made in heaven nor do they always grow out of readymade social
homogeneity. The creation of India’s republic was indeed an audacious attempt
because of the many social schisms. But the audacity shown by the founding
fathers in creating the republic needed to be matched by the sustained
collective audacity to “keep the republic”.
There has been a
grievous mismatch between the ambitions of the founding fathers and the will of
members of the new republic. The social structure was an impediment in the
republican project, as Ambedkar pointed out, but the skills of the political
process and the willingness of the collective must have been wanting too. So,
on each Republic Day, the nagging question would be this: The constituent
assembly gave us the republic, but do we really want to keep it?
