We should have State Constitutions, shouldn't we?

Having one constitution, such as the current one, for the entire Indian nation and not letting States to have their respective constitutions is like taking a set of jigsaw pieces and pressing them to fit within a shape of player's choice! No, the pieces fit in only one way, and that way is only decided by the pieces themselves.

Presence of a Constitution of India (COI) on top of suspended State constitutions is perhaps the root cause for those umpteen amendments India has made to the COI and for the prevalence of dire problems in India's socio-economic landscape. For instance, the number of appendages made to Article 371 - the special status gimmick - displays the finicky and fluid state of vision over national policy. Such piecewise approach to making modifications in COI not only provide a reason for its bulky nature but also explain why and how it has failed to perform its original intended duty in this democracy. The very size of the constitution and the vast demography that it intends to acquire under its purview makes it increasingly untenable given the increasing awareness in people about the sovereign and republic nature of this democracy.

The year 2014 is turning out to be an year for the States to reckon with. Chief Ministers of multiple States - Delhi, AP and, just this afternoon, Bihar - have expressed anguish at the alleged misdeeds committed by the central government against the wishes of people living in their States. These can be directly attributed to a rather convolved Constitution of India that often lands even constitutional experts in moments of introspection and doubt; a doubt that shatters the confidence of people in their nation, and also its large, bulky constitution.

This bulky constitution resembles a big fat balloon with multiple punctures - you just cannot say where it will fly, meaning where this constitution will lead India to cannot be predicted easily. The mirth is higher when you have smaller, yet a more colourful bunch of balloons in your hand than one large punctured balloon in flight. You get the analogy, right?

In another State, Tamilnadu, the CM expresses her desire to free a set of convicts who've been in prison for nearly two decades, but the constitution by some weird combination, which too is figured out after much deliberation among experts, makes her seek the Centre's approval despite the fact that Police is a State subject as per Schedule 7 of the Constitution of India itself! Instead of having the Schedule 7 dictate what the States must govern and what the Centre must (& can), wouldn't it be rather more convenient and more appropriate for the States to have their own constitutions and the COI address subjects left behind unattended by the State constitutions? Wouldn't that be real decentralization and real federalism? Wouldn't that be in line with the real spirit of a democracy where the degree of delegation of governance droops with distance - both physical and representative.

The repercussion of this constitutional arrangement is also felt on the linguistic diversity of India. With regards to language planning and policy, Constitution of India is mired in controversy - controversies based on assumptions that go squarely against the nation's linguistic diversity.

The official language act, for instance, which is a statute law spun off from Articles 343 & 344 of the COI, forbids usage of any Indian language apart from Hindi at the Centre. This is a clear violation of human rights happening right under the aegis of a constitution that lays the political framework of this nation. This violation could have been precluded had the language policy of the nation been a linear summation and intercourse of the language policies of all States.

As the famous quote goes, people of India live in their States, and the Centre really need not have any business directly with the people. With such a natural arrangement of business, it is implied that there is very little need for such an all-encompassing constitution at the Centre whereas the need for such a constitution certainly exists at the State level. Time to write one?

Indian Democracy: The Highness of Lows?

A DEMOCRACY should ensure people don't live at the mercy of a single person. Also, Democracy should be about questioning the contemporary and about being able to shape one's tomorrows oneself. This is equity characteristic of a democracy, isn't it? From the way the Telangana episode is unfolding, that equity appears to be denied, perhaps by means of the constitution itself, and in doing so, the President of India, sitting at the apex of the Indian Democratic Republic, seems unquestionable, till now.

If the President's office, occupied by a person with recorded political loyalty to a party that's in power at Centre, agrees to hand over a State Reorganization bill to the parliament, discounting the State's aspirations, the President is indeed portrayed as unquestionable because the rest of the country can only watch, quite literally though! Because the State and its millions of people are absolutely at the mercy of the President's office and the President's decision in this regard. Can such living in the mercy of a single person be called a democracy?

Something in this episode tells me there's an unwritten assumption in our constitution that people are expected to believe the President is unquestionable, and it is better that way for the nation! It is unfair & even unreal to expect an entire nation to assume that one human being in this nation will alone remain unquestionable, even in matters that directly affect the lives of millions of people spread across vast stretches of land - matching that of some countries in the EU! In fact the celebrated office of the President enjoys more constitutional allowances than a democracy can actually afford. For instance the Presidential Ordinance offers an easy route for a favourable political party in power at the Centre to enforce law without opposition, albeit for a maximum of six months.

While the constitution does provide solutions to overrule an unruly or insane President, it does not equip people with a solution to a problem that could arise out of a hidden nexus between the President and a few parliamentarians, who could use the President's political superiority and immunity of sorts to siphon party gains, and subsequently, individual gains.

Talking about living at the mercy of an individual - applying such observations to the Telangana episode India will come across to anyone as that democracy in which people live with the least number of total people that collectively represent them, yet the highest number of total people that don't represent them but are 'empowered' to express their voice for or against them.

That is perhaps a new high in lows among democracies.

People who have seen democracies in action in other parts of the world may see something fundamentally wrong in this setup. The idea of representation has been infected with a virus at birth - a virus of assumption that the newfound idea of representation would work, an assumption that people, hailing from ages of monarchy, would know how to handle representation and get what they need. This assumption has cost the Indian peoples very dear; it has cost them a constitution that is unable to sustain the nation as well as would be desired. This assumption has pushed people to now question its very sanctity and relevance. It has forced people to have the weirdest representation formula that doesn't work for people, but works to pull more power to the Centre. Its time those questions were asked out in public, even if it were addressed to the President.

(After deciding to post this, #PepperSpray has shrouded Parliament. What else could happen when an entire people's identity is so brutally trampled upon?)

The Anti-Incumbency Inherent in the Constitution!

ROOT causing Congress party's decimation in the recent State Assembly elections, especially in Delhi, and a similar decimation of the BJP in Karnataka earlier this year, one can find that quite a lot of blame of lacklustre performance at the State level is being attributed to the lacklustre performance of the ruling party at the Center. Said in other words, people heard lauding Congress' good governance under Sheila Dikshit in Delhi last 15 years are attributing this December election defeat to the poor governance by Congress at the Center.

This blaming scheme probably has its roots in the Schedule 7 of the Constitution of India, which distributes such subjects of governance to the Center that had rather been in State control so that a performance or failure of a State government can clearly be attributed to the State government alone. This arrangement of subjects - while it gives more control to those that run the Central government - creates a confusion among voters while assessing the performance or failure of their incumbent State ruling party, thereby rendering them clueless about which party their vote must go in current elections.

Whether this confusion is the genius of the Constitution or of the people that reserve the right to remove such confusion is an easy question to answer. Its the people, who hold the right to amend the Constitution - the legislators, that need to act and amend the Schedule-7 so as to re-arrange subjects of governance between the State and the Center. These people include elected members of State assemblies apart from MPs, for according to Art 368 an amendment to Schedule-7 needs approval from more than half of the State assemblies.

Now, in the interest of those political parties that have aspirations at both State and Central level politics I believe there is value in picking up this cause of an amendment to the 7th Schedule that is also long pending. There are some parties like the BJP, of course, that would like to keep the 7th schedule that way, what with the manufactured image of some of their larger than thou candidates whose projected national image is expected to win them State elections also. But is it really going to help once they gain Central power and continue to be subject to the same Constitution that is bound to pull them down, eventually?

Isn't it time we realized why people get bored of incumbent political parties even if, for a moment, we assume those parties were doing the right things? Isn't it time we saw the anti-incumbency inherent in our Constitution?

Tall Statutes, Taller Statues and Dark Shadows!

ALTHOUGH the author of this article appears to uphold the consideration promised in return to the original surrender made by the princes, and it deserves its respect, it may be important to ponder as to why there must have been such a surrender in the first place. 

With all their valor and revering subjects in their respective States, why did those princely States end up surrendering such huge amounts of money and property to a Union they were so reluctant to join in the first place? Given that affiliation and inclusion to either the Indian or the Pakistani republics was optional to these princely States, their inclusion amid heated expressions of reluctance must have been a coercion if not a conquer. In such a case what value does The Union hold to the people who belonged to these princely States and what reverence can be expected from them towards the Indian Union which upon a simple amendment to its constitution in 1971 repealed all the payments promised to the people of the dissolved princely States?

It is also questionable had these princely States not submitted and not reluctantly got coerced into The Union, would they have been in as poor state of existence as now? The Hyderabad princely State and its people, for instance, are having a bitter experience in the Indian Union now where their homeland - Andhra Pradesh - is being split in two much against popular demands against such division. Can we now pat Sardar Patel's back posthumously or our own backs for this abuse of centralized political power in inflicting pain to the Telugu people of Andhra by The Union? Did all the people who subscribed to this union in 1950 deserve this? Dont we need some time to slow down and think about a re-writing of such a constitution that lets someone to care so little for the very people of this union?

Isn't it even higher levels of stupidity to let national parties like the BJP and the INC to make this topic a bait to fish for popular votes in upcoming elections? Isn't it stupid to take sides of either of these parties (and their philosophies too) and thereby appear to support such continued acts of brutal coercion, division and undemocratic rule?

This statement by the author though summarizes to some extent the right spirit for us to derive from this piece of history bearing very well in current context:

In the end, the abolition of Privy Purses will remain one of the most shameful events in our constitutional history. The nation saved Rs.4 crore annually but lost its honour. It is equally regrettable that neither the Janata Party in 1977 nor any subsequent non-Congress government did anything to redeem Patel’s pledge. What purpose will, then, be served by spending Rs.2,500 crore to build the tallest statue in his memory?

Gottilla! Gottilla!

To all those "Kannada gottilla" speakers, here's my humblest response to your non-Kannada (especially Hindi) words spoken to me: "GOTTILLA!!"

In fact this approach worked like a magic this morning in my bus. One guy asked me about a bus stop in Hindi and I said the word - GOTTILLA pretty earnestly. After some murmuring and a long pause, the guy spoke again, this time in Kannada, however broken, and I gave a helping response in Kannada with a smile. He smiled too!

This should teach us two lessons - (1) that the people that come into our cities, no matter how fresh their migration is, they do have the capability to speak a few words because they want to make a living here, and (2) that it needs a little friendly, earnest and shrewd force to get those Kannada words out of their brains and mouths. We only need to be smart enough to realize (1) and strong enough to sustain (2)!!

Well this is the way relations can be strengthened. The imposition of Hindi, like a ghost-god that instills fear in the vulnerable, has instilled fear of attracting fellow countrymen's wrath of traitorship. This has made Kannadigas sitting ducks in the fire of Hindi Imposition and they've accommodated themselves to respond in Hindi on the very first utterance of that gottilla word.

In short the subtle negative in gottilla that has been working against us can easily, this way, be converted in our favour.