Tag: raj dharma

The Missing Raj Dharma of Our Republic

Raj dharma is quintessentially a moral code that translates into ‘Rule of Law’ and the institutions that are designed to protect it are under serious threat today.

Some years ago, a wise old prime minister who was a poet-statesman chided the chief minister of a state, saying, ‘You should have followed your raj dharma.’ When the chief minister responded feebly that he was ‘protecting his dharma’, the prime minister again reminded him that ‘There is nothing higher than raj dharma.’ That chief minister today is the prime minister of India; he has been for the last eight years or so. It’s a good time to take stock as to whether he has been true to raj dharma or not.

To those who are innocent of what raj dharma is or where to find it, one must refer them not to any text in the Ramayana or Mahabharata but to a document far more recent than that. In fact, Sushma Swaraj, in one of her elevated moments, said on the floor of Lok Sabha that ‘the holy book for us is not the Bhagavad Gita but the Constitution of India’. But then, she belonged to a different generation of BJP leaders.

Truly, the founding document of our Republic, the Constitution of India, is the final legal and moral code, the dharma of our state. That dharma is distinct from and opposite to ‘adharma’ – or a state of lawlessness, a Hobbesian state of jungle law. Dharma comes from the Sanskrit root word ‘dhri’, which means to maintain or to preserve. In the early Vedas and other ancient texts, dharma referred to the cosmic law that created the ‘ordered universe’ from chaos.

It is the Constitution that provided an ‘orderly’ political arrangement for a nation emerging from the chaotic state of 200 of colonial rule. It proclaimed our nation as a Republic – one that is ‘ruled by laws’ and not by the whims and fancies of a monarch or dictator. Republic also meant that the highest authority in the land shall be an elected head and that all offices in the government are open to all citizens, irrespective of caste, creed, religion, race, region or gender.

Also read: A Foreign Policy Fuelled By ‘Calcium Pills’

The Constitution is a socio-political contract between the rulers and the ruled, and it lays down the rules as to how they shall be governed. The first three words of the preamble, ‘We the People’, are therefore rich in significance and implication. For in it is the location of ultimate sovereignty over this land. The Preamble needs to be reiterated, even if briefly. We the People have solemnly resolved to constitute India into a ‘Sovereign Socialist Secular Democratic Republic’ and to secure to all its citizens Justice, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.

The present government may quibble with the words ‘Socialist and Secular’ but that is the law of the land, as it stands today. A prime minister who has sworn, while taking the oath of office, to ‘bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of India’ must protect its Preamble, to start with. These goals are not merely aspirational ones. They are embodied as fundamental rights enforceable in a court of law by every citizen who feels discriminated against or denied equal treatment.

Is raj dharma being followed today?

Let us start by examining the promise and the delivery. Modi made the promise of ‘Sab ka saath, sab ka vikas’ in 2014, and in 2019 added ‘Sab ka vishwas’, for he probably realised at the end of the first term that he had not gained people’s trust.

We have seen enough evidence of the fact that he clearly excluded minority communities in his declared policy of ‘Sab ka saath’, though he has now started remembering them, since last week, as the countdown to the general elections has begun. Nor was there much vikas in his first term in office. The country went through eight quarters of negative growth from 6.80% in 2017 to 3.74% in December 2019, well before the COVID-19 pandemic struck, with the poor and the weak getting the worst brunt of it. There was no equality of opportunities for minorities. Nor equity in incomes for the poor and the deprived, despite a promise to double the incomes of farmers and workers.

The first tenet of raj dharma to be abandoned was secularism, the constitutional guarantee that no one shall be discriminated against on grounds of religion. We saw the incorporation of religion into the notion of citizenship through the legislation of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act. Then there were repeated pronouncements on the National Population Register and the National Register of Citizens, all aimed at disenfranchising one minority community.

Second was the abandonment of socialism, as the government’s policies increasingly favoured a few rich individuals, particularly belonging to one state. As the latest Oxfam report indicates, 1% of India’s rich control 40% of the nation’s wealth and the top 10% of our population holds 77% of the national wealth. As much as 73% of the wealth generated in 2017 went to the richest 1% while 670 million Indians who comprise the poorest half of the population saw only a 1% increase in their wealth.

Also read: An Unmanaged Foreign Media Has Got the Modi Government Fuming

Third is the change in the nature of the political discourse. Today, the ruler is the great benefactor, the one who bestows gifts on his people. The people, today, are regarded not as citizens with rights, but as ‘labharthis’ – subjects who seek and have benefitted from the munificence of the Great Leader. Incidentally, the ‘labha’ or the benefits that the subject has received are all from the state treasury, from the taxpayers’ money, but it is projected as a gift from the magnanimous leader, with his photos stuck on everything from the ration bags to vaccination certificates.

The term ‘labharthi’ is a pernicious change in terminology as the citizen is alienated and disempowered from his rights that the raj dharma guarantees, such as the right to life, liberty, equality, justice, right to education, health care, housing and jobs. The Constitution only recognises a citizen and not a ‘labharthi’. A labharthi may or may not get his benefits, he is not entitled to them; whereas a citizen has certain inalienable rights, which no government can deny or take away.

Fourth, the key architecture of our Constitution is in the separation of powers and independence of constitutional bodies to act as checks and balance upon one another. That now stands completely eroded as an authoritarian ruler rides roughshod over the powers of the Election Commission, the CAG, the ED, the CBI and the judiciary. The ongoing battle between the law minister and vice president on the one hand, and the Supreme Court on the other, over its power to appoint judges, is aimed at capturing the last bastion of independence.

Raj dharma is quintessentially a moral code that translates into ‘Rule of Law’ and the institutions that are designed to protect it are under serious threat today. This is no raj dharma, it is adharma. If A.B. Vajpayee was alive today, he would indeed be a sad man.

Ravi Joshi was formerly in the Cabinet Secretariat.

Why Don’t We Hold Our Leaders to a Higher Standard of Morality?

There is a lack of moral indignation in India. We are triggered if political leaders fake their education degrees or display ignorance in matters of technology, but condone their participation in some of the worst massacres in modern India.

A teacher once gave me a good piece of advice: If you want to criticise something effectively, use a razor blade, not a butter knife.

As the general elections were drawing to a close, netizens suddenly rolled up their sleeves to criticise the BJP and Narendra Modi for a string of issues. From serious ones – such as the Election Commission’s suspicious concessions for the ruling government – to quibbles about the kind of questions the PM was asked in his seemingly scripted interviews.

Criticism limited to the ex-post performance of elected leaders is pointless if it does not question the moral legitimacy of their candidature: first and foremost, on what ethical grounds is a candidate eligible to contest an election?

Narendra Modi’s career as a politician should have been cut short way back in 2002 when he failed to take accountability for any security lapses in Godhra leading to the death of 59 Hindu karsevaks as well as the orchestrated attacks on thousands of Muslims later in the state.

Critiquing the Election Commission for lapses in its autonomy is irrelevant if we, as a society, turn a blind eye to significantly worse moral and legal violations from our chosen leadership. In fact, we might have done well to have learnt our lesson much earlier, in 1984 itself. The Congress and its leaders ought to have been rejected, on the basis of moral accountability, for failing to protect their Sikh citizens. But that was not the case.

Also read: The Right Wing and the Myth of Selective Outrage

No politician in India has ever stepped down over the killings of its citizens, in targeted mass violence, on his or her own volition. If L.K. Advani had offered to resign, it was in the Jain Hawala case and not when the Liberhan Commission Report indicted him for complicity in the Babri Mosque demolition that triggered Hindu-Muslim violence across the country. If Sonia Gandhi offered to resign, it was over the office of profit controversy in 2006, and not her party’s alleged collusion in the murder of 3,000 Sikhs in Delhi in 1984.

Human lives as means to an end

The 19th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant held it to be morally wrong for human beings to be treated merely as the means rather than an end in themselves. Political leadership in India has almost always functioned as the antithesis of Kantian ethics. But more worrying is the instrumentality that we, the voters, adopt in our evaluation of candidates for the electoral process.

Did he or would he provide jobs? Did she or would she build roads? Agreed, in a patronage democracy like India’s these are critical concerns for one’s daily survival. However, the idea of fairness, and giving equal respect to every individual, is much more crucial to the democratic process.

As voters we criticise parties and demand moral responsibility only when we are short-changed in the provision of material goods but choose not to question their moral legitimacy when they normalise violence against fellow citizens. If politicians do not resign over the killings of people it is also because there is little outrage among fellow citizens over deliberate murders than there is over corruption and accidents.

Narendra Modi, A.B. Vajpayee and L.K. Advani. Credit: PTI/Files

Narendra Modi, A.B. Vajpayee and L.K. Advani. Credit: PTI/Files

It is well known that in the middle of mass violence in Gujarat in 2002, the former prime minister A.B. Vajpayee had reminded Modi of his raj dharma or the moral accountability of a leader. Once Advani threatened to resign, Vajpayee withheld his decision to sack Modi.

Also read: ‘Blame It on the Mob’ – How Governments Shun the Responsibility of Judicial Redress

Sure, Vajpayee did not follow up on what was his own raj dharma, but neither did the voters of India. The absence of moral outrage among citizens for allowing an elected politician to continue in office despite presiding over some of the worst massacres in modern India – and continuing to accept his candidature in subsequent elections – is extremely disturbing.

Selective outrage

If we see it morally fit to let elected leaders, who shrug off mass killings and selective violence against specific groups of people as uncontainable one-off episodes and to continue participating in the democratic process, it is worth asking what the threshold of our moral indignation is.

Alas, it seems that the threshold is very high in matters of intrinsic value. We are triggered if political leaders fake their education degrees or display ignorance in technological matters, but condone them when they utilise human life as an instrument to advance their political careers.

It is common knowledge that mass violence (or “riots”) in India are implicitly orchestrated by politicians for electoral gain. Yet, victims of violence have no option but to settle for an apology from the said politicians, as the Sikhs did with the Congress. Or to settle with nothing at all, as did many victims of violence in Gujarat and Nellie and Muzaffarnagar and, indeed, of the cow protection vigilantes.

Also read: In the Republic of Lynchings, There Is No Us and Them

If at all there is a debate in civil society, it is relegated to arguing about which political party is responsible for a greater quantum of killings. In the endless whataboutery, moral accountability as a criterion for candidature is completely ignored. If ruling politicians are credited for all the good things that happen under their regime, why not discredit them for the bad?

Raheel Dhattiwala is a sociologist trained at Oxford University and author of Keeping the Peace: Spatial Differences in Hindu-Muslim Violence in Gujarat in 2002 (Cambridge University Press).