In 1946, Lord Wavell finally acquiesced to the persistent demand of the Congress for a brand new constitution for India. The first meeting of the new Constituent Assembly was held in December that year; little did the 300 members chosen on the basis of that year's provincial elections realise that it would take three years to give India its unique charter of rights and responsibilities, the longest in the world. The proceedings of the Assembly spanned eleven sessions over 165 days with the revisions of drafts being carried out by several sub-groups and committees.
More than the final outcome of the Assembly's endeavours, it was the process that was unique. Debates may till rage as to how broad-based the Assembly itself was, since more than 80 per cent of the members were from the Congress. But the process as, Mr Ramachandra Guha, points out in his India after Gandhi , was made “participatory” by asking the public to send in their submissions.
Indians responded in what can be arguably the first and most historic exercise to help create, during the most turbulent times in the subcontinent's history, a formal structure for a democracy yet to come. And as Mr Guha points out, the varied responses, from tribal leaders to the Central Jewish Board asking for political representation testified not just to the “baffling heterogeneity of India” but importantly, from the perspective of modern times “to the precocious existence of a rights culture among (them)”.
At a less epochal level but no less significant from the policymakers' point of view, one might recall that the RBI often places proposals for changes or reforms in the public domain as “drafts” inviting views from various quarters and frequently acknowledging them in its final recommendations.
ROLE IN POLICYMAKING
Both the epic and the prosaic seemed to have been forgotten by the UPA-led government, while presenting to the nation a code of conduct that may not have the aureole of history attaching to it, but is certainly seminal enough in its underlying premise — to hold those who rule more accountable than they have ever been before.
Yet, the government, at the outset, sought to push through Parliament its own Bill, ignoring not just the Anna Hazare-led Jana Lokpal version and other versions, but its own history. In the bargain, it lost not just a chance to prevent the threat of the fast-unto-death and the brief, but intense, groundswell of anger, but also a chance to reclaim its most vital constituency it seems to have lost to Anna Hazare, the urban middle-class.
But Anna Hazare was no better; his fast was not, as some have hinted, a form of ‘blackmail' so much as a personality contest against the government, a form of realpolitik challenge, a game of dice with television cameras pitching the odds in the favour of the one willing to sacrifice a life: For what? Not so much to prove the Lokpal Bill was wrong but that the Jan Lokpal draft — “Team” Anna's — was right.
In retrospect, what the nation witnessed — and the middle class enjoyed the spectacle the most — was a battle between two sets of dogmatic, Manichean-type principles. Both Dr Singh's government and Anna Hazare's team had forgotten the simple lesson that the profoundly epochal evolution of India's Constitution was willing to teach.
Part of the reason for that amnesia is the arrogance of power; in the government's case, it was based on an accumulating self-consciousness about its destiny as the nation's catalyst of growth, with its electoral victory appearing to vindicate that arrogance. Anna Hazare and his team's hubris, manifest in their unwillingness to harbour any other version of the Lokpal Bill, and by that token, any other idea of democracy or morality, emanated from an injudicious anger at being shortchanged; a creeping recognition in their camp that in the game of realpolitik the government really held the cards even of the electronic media, seemed to validate their inflexible positions.
MIDDLE-CLASS BASE
The urban middle-class, which has been one of the beneficiaries of the recent growth, is the primary support base of Team Anna. Used to the exercise of a benevolent arrogance that eased their passage to a more brazen and acceptable Westernisation, the middle-class rediscovered corruption literally one morning; not the pervasive kind that in the early seventies stymied their own protracted ascent to prosperity but the monopolistic kind of corruption centralised and dressed in the euphemisms of pride and progress.
Anna Hazare's crusade taps and feeds off a waxing and waning, media-fuelled disappointment at the vast usurpation of resources they assume are meant for them alone. The middle-class idea of corruption-as-usurpation locates its agency in “Team Anna's” narrow focus on centralised power as the repository of corruption, that is not seen as a collaborative enterprise with members of civil society but as an after-the-event fact.
DEMOCRACY AS PROCESS
The face-off between two unyielding positions has had to confront and yield to more flexible and varied positions from the wings; the pressure of various constituencies to also be heard. That a Standing Committee of Parliament will now hear various versions of the Lokpal Bill and the views of the public to decide on the outcome softened the unyielding stances of both protoganists; in the bargain, they bore eloquent testimony to that precocious sense of rights that Indians exhibited 65 years ago. Corruption has been ubiquitous in the public domain, now its antidotes may emerge from that vast heterogeneity that is India.
There, perhaps, lies the essence of democracy: not in being called one but in always becoming one.