INDIA: THE ROAD TO RENAISSANCE – A VISION AND AN AGENDA
Author: Bhimeswara Challa
Publisher: Gyan Publishing House
Pages: 401
Price: Rs 1,600
This is a thought-provoking work based on the premise that the Indian Constitution in its present form is both “un-Indian” and “unworkable” and that the country urgently needs Version 2.0. The blurb accurately describes the book as “a blueprint for a new resurgent India” with an analysis of where things went wrong and concrete suggestions on how to put the country on the right track. The author, Bhimeswara Challa, born in 1935, is a double retiree from the IAS and the UN, and brings his considerable learning, training and experience to bear in this comprehensive work.
Challa begins with the argument that the Constitution was a rush job. In fact, he describes it as “a ‘bag of borrowings’ from other Constitutions” including those of UK, USA, Ireland, the former USSR, Japan, France, Canada and Australia. He postulates that the Constituent Assembly, which framed the original document, did not give sufficient weight to the fact that Indian society is “maddeningly multifaceted”. As he puts it, “the quasi-federal structure chosen to accommodate the kaleidoscopic plurality and diversity of India in order to facilitate a blend of self-rule and shared rule, strong Centre and no less strong States” has not worked. He contends that the strong state created by the Constitution is against the natural Indian order, where a strong society and weak state was the basis for thriving. Traditionally Indian concepts such as ‘Village Swaraj’, dear to Gandhiji’s heart, were ignored, though this was pointed out right at the start, he says.
The concept of democracy as prevalent in India, and the system of elections as followed in the country are both decried. “Indeed, the one word that best describes the state of Indian democracy is ‘dysfunction’,” Challa says, while elections “bring out the worst in both the politician and the public.” Another point he makes is that “we take pride in holding regular elections on a gigantic scale. But we ignore everything else that is vital to the spirit of a democracy. He criticizes the electoral system and lists drawbacks, including corruption. He says the country has a host of other problems too. These include “moral impairment and mental mediocrity”; the fact that “our role models are charlatans and entertainers, not men of letters or apostles of morals”; and that “we are under the spell of chalta hai (an expression that means it’s OK or things will work out).” He calls for course correction vis-a-vis administration and governance set-ups, harking back to our own past. He advocates an indigenous framework suited to the uniqueness of India. He recommends going back to the ancient system of gana sangha or ganarajya.
On the economic front, Challa feels choosing GDP-centricity was the wrong approach. Expressing the view that “the need to go beyond GDP as a measure of progress is something the Western world is waking up to,” he seems to hold up Gross National Happiness (Bhutan model) instead. So he makes a case for changing the Constitution. “The nation must have “a second Constitution – this time an Indian Constitution, germane to the soil and soul of the land, inspired and influenced by its own ancient civilization, and taking full note of its preceding precedents and practices,” Challa says. And this is the pivot of the book. The new framework, he insists, should be based on a ‘shared sovereignty’ and a ‘divided authority’.
In Challa’s view, “any shift to a truly ‘Indian’ Constitution is the equivalent of a de facto Indian renaissance [hence the title], and has to be anchored in spiritualism, which in the case of India, was built on the bedrock of Dharma. …we need to sew together the scientific and the spiritual.” And consequently, he gives extensive attention to the concept of Dharma, seeing it as the common thread informing “how human life should be lived on earth in order to be in harmony with the natural order and its laws.” In fact, the idea of Dharma is what India has to offer the world, he argues.
According to Challa, “even before it actually became an independent nation, many leading lights in the Western world were looking forward to the spiritual difference a free India could make to a world weary and wounded after the trauma of World War II.” He says “India represents the largest venture or experiment in democracy with a seamless sinew of diversity in unity, perhaps unparalleled anywhere, or anytime, in the history of the world. If the Indian experiment fails, it will have seismic global repercussions.” While going back to the future, as it were, in framing a new and more suitable Constitutional framework, he wants India to become a lab, modifying and tailoring the principles of Dharma to suit modern needs. Emphasising the need for both political and economic ‘autonomy’ at every level, he brings up the Athenian belief in sortition or lottery over elections, a system which he says had checks and balances.
“In the present system, people choose from among those pre-chosen by political parties. In the so-called sortition method, the selection is direct, everyone is eligible, and gets a chance over time,” the author explains. In favour of sortition, he argues that it “ensures rotation of leadership and its short term, together with randomness of selection, ensures that power is not entrenched and that status is not accumulated, that hierarchies are not encouraged, and that there is no elite group with special qualities from which leaders are elected.” And the best thing is, he says, it’s not a system that is foreign to India, for, it was once in vogue in Uttaramerur of Tamil Nadu and also in Jharkhand.
Challa gives solid historical background for this contention. Simultaneously, he emphasises that, “we must bear in mind one salient point: for much of its history, India’s political plurality did not come in the way of cultural coherence and civilizational survival.” He adds, “That common thread is what has come to be called, in modern times, ‘fraternity’, which is enshrined in the preamble of our Constitution.” He stresses that “We cannot have fraternity with ill-will at heart and malice in the mind.” What is needed is to instil the spirit of cooperation, complementarity and camaraderie, a feeling for affinity and solidarity, not coalescing or amalgamation. This, he points out, is the central concept of Hindu philosophy: sheltering and synergising – approaches absent in the present national and political climate.
Challa lists desirable characteristics of the new Constitution, including
- Bottom-up governance
- Moving away from unitary or semi-federal or federal models and closer to the people
- Making plurality and diversity of the country its basic building block
- Putting in place structures and arrangements that genuinely allow people to be in the driver’s seat.
The stumbling blocks he sees to bringing about these changes include the “cocktail of civic cynicism, populist nihilism” and India’s scale and size. In conclusion, he says, India needs “a mix of two moods and models: Satyagraha and Ubuntu.” The first we are all familiar with. The second, an African idea, he explains as ‘I am, because of you’ – “more philosophically, it means the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity.” And the call to action: “to instigate a moral insurrection, a mass movement to overcome all that is coming in the way of what needs to be done for Indian renewal and renaissance.” For this, a change of mindset is imperative, jettisoning the mediocrity hang-up, and a concerted effort to awaken our collective consciousness, beginning, perhaps, with GenZ, the avant-garde of our precarious future.
From the reader’s point of view, there’s a lot of stage-setting and giving the historical context of developments. In the process, interesting snippets of information are provided; for example, how the crucial word ‘fraternity’ came to be included in the Preamble of the Constitution. On the flip side, there is also a quite tedious repetition of ideas. Some of the views expressed can be considered disruptive in the present context, such as, “Expecting that everybody has to be like-minded is anti-democratic” and “India would not be what it is today without its previous history of integration of new peoples into its society”. There are also some eerily timely warnings. For example, “Our relentless rebuke and reengineering of nature, in a culture that once equated divinity with nature, is a clear rupture from our moral motivations.” The book offers lots of food for thought, too. For instance, “We abet corrupt elections and expect clean politics.”
The author discusses complex concepts like ‘territorial selfhood’ and the usually omitted second part of the oft-quoted ‘Nonviolence is the ultimate dharma’ – ‘So too is violence in service of dharma.’ Challa doesn’t pull his punches. He delivers a stinging rebuke of the present-day situation: “It has led to the transfer of publicly-owned resources into private hands at a pittance… It is such a model that economically empowers some of us to… scout and shop all over the world to discard our surplus money to acquire the rarest and most expensive things, and dine in the most expensive restaurants… while economically impoverishing millions…”
As a seasoned administrator and erudite scholar, Challa presents a strong case for a change in ‘operating system’, rather than a ‘re-set’, to borrow terms from modern technology, in order to correct past mistakes and help India contribute meaningfully to the world. From the point of view of style, he quotes extensively from a smorgasbord of philosophy, literature and religion, including Manusmriti, Arthashastra, Maha Upanishad, Rig Veda, Kautilya, Edmund Burke, Rousseau, Beatrice Webb, Aurobindo Ghosh, Desmond Tutu, Shashi Tharoor, Lee Kuan Yew, Charles Dickens, Tagore and the Greek classics.
A humungous amount of reading, research and, most of all, thought, has gone into this complex work, apart from a lifetime of experience. The ideas are lofty, the language sophisticated. At Rs 1600 a copy, this one is for the policy makers.
(This review is by Susan Philip, editor and writer, who started her career in journalism in the mid-1980s at the editorial desk of the Press Trust of India. She later chose to freelance as an editor. She has worked on projects for UNICEF, UNDP, and WAN-IFRA, and edited fiction and non-fiction books by various authors. She is assistant editor, Press Institute of India.)
from Webdoux