The Republic Day is celebrated in India every 26th January to mark the day that the Constitution that “We, the People of India” gave to ourselves, took effect.
There is a very clear and present danger that by the time I get to write this post in 2025, the soul of the Indian Constitution will have been irrevocably lost through the removal of the adjectives SOCIALIST and SECULAR from the Preamble, and this post would become a sort of Requiem.
Although these two words were not specifically written down in the first Constitution, the sprit that informed the writers of that document, subsumed these concepts in the two words it did mention – EQUALITY and FRATERNITY. No doubt inspired by the French Revolution, which the Western educated elite that wrote the Constitution, probably found to be universally acceptable and noncontroversial.
It was probably the realisation that both these aspirations were still far from the country’s reach two decades after Independence, that forced the then Government, to take advantage of the curtailed democracy during the Emergency, to amend the Constitution and insert the words SOCIALIST and SECULAR in its Preamble.
So why was India not able to achieve greater equality despite adopting overtly socialist policies in the first few decades after Independence? The chief historical reason is that India could never crush the old feudal system riddled with centuries of caste and class-based inequality, as the other Asian giants could: Japan after its defeat in WW2, South Korea after a bloody war and the subsequent division of that country, and China through the violent and messy Cultural Revolution.
Moreover, in rebuilding their societies, these three countries chose education as the chief vehicle of social change, and all adopted the two-pronged approach of UNIVERSALISATION of education, and VOCATIONALISATION of Higher Education. India failed to do so despite a visionary like Pandit Nehru at its helm. Instead, we went in for the creation of elite (emphasis added) institutions like the IITs and IIMs, for the self-styled ‘elite’ or entitled class, which had monopolized knowledge for millennia – rather like the Scribes of Ancient Egypt.
So, when the era of global trade and connectivity dawned, South Korea and China could build up their manufacturing sector, making everything from a toothbrush to an iPhone for the world’s consumption, and providing employment across the spectrum – from the unskilled, to the semi-skilled, to the skilled, to the highly skilled among its workforce, in the same matrix.
India could not: Its ultra-hitech skills of a miniscule number found greener pastures abroad, while the low skilled had limited job opportunities in the public sector (which also shrank after a policy of deliberate divestment and privatisation by the present government.) The result has been a burgeoning informal sector, and impoverishment of the poor while the richest grow richer, as a recent ICE survey revealed:
This depletion of a generation worth of human capital is unrecoverable and it means that India will not have a seat at the table in the emerging multipolar world order – witness its already diminishing clout in multilateral fora like SCO and BRICS+. Therefore, with the ideal of EQUALITY now firmly beyond our reach, the word SOCIALIST in the Preamble has become rather redundant.
And what about Fraternity? Hasn’t that also remained unattainable in a society riven by caste and class and with a bloody history of riot after riot in its 75-year history? India has consistently failed to act in a secular way either by the standard definition of separating State and religion, or by its own version of secularism as the State acting neutrally between religions. Not when every political party in every election plays the ‘caste and community’ card right from the selection of candidates, to the design of campaigns and even the targeting of welfare schemes. Which begs the question: what is secular about the Government’s calculus that we need that word in the Preamble?
Globally, too, both these words are falling into disfavour: The collapse of the Soviet Union put paid to Socialism, and today, strident religiosity is rife everywhere – whether it is a Prime Minister justifying a genocide by referring to a 3000-year-old battle with the Amalek, or the Patriarch of Moscow, urging the Russian Army to take on Antichrist!
Yes, as someone who grew up in the heart of a compassionate society, I shall shed a silent tear when India does away with its socialist and secular aspirations; but so long as the other adjectives, SOVEREIGN and DEMOCRATIC, remain untouched, I shall be back here to celebrate the ONE Book which unites us all.
Jai Hind!
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