The Hindu : New Delhi News : Need to balance individual freedom, state authority

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Friday, Aug 12, 2005

New Delhi

New Delhi

Need to balance individual freedom, state authority

Staff Reporter

Concern over aspiration-reality gap

Ashok H. Desai, former Attorney General of India, delivering thelecture at IIC in New Delhi on Thursday. Photo: Shiv Kumar Pushpakar

NEW DELHI: Underlining the need for greater concern over continuous debasement and failure of institutions set up by the Constitution, the former Attorney-General for India, Ashok H. Desai, said on Thursday that "each free society has to balance constantly individual freedom and state authority''.

Delivering the Tenth Prem Bhatia Memorial Lecture at India International Centre here, Mr. Desai spoke on "Dangers to Indian Democracy''. Noting that the Constitution-makers were not unaware that the institutions they were setting up were always subject to chance, he described the Constitution as a living document that had to be interpreted according to the changing needs of time. "Even while maintaining a middle path between the realist and utopian view, anyone who is concerned with the working of our state for the last 50 years would wonder about the gap between aspirations and reality,'' he noted.

Moving on to the tendencies that resulted in the Constitution yielding a result very different from the one contemplated while formulating it, Mr. Desai said some of the problem areas seemed to be taking law as a norm and not command, overlapping circles of loyalty, treating political leasers with the devotion for god, populism, non-recognition of public property or office as public trust, criminalisation of politics and standard in public life. Describing the habit of being overtly loyal to caste or constituency as another problem, Mr. Desai remarked that "After Independence, the call of caste or community has become stronger and more and more dubious gentlemen are defining their way to the legislature by direct elections irrespective of their misconduct in the world at large. Sometimes even the identity of the candidates is not relevant as much as the group to which he belongs.''

Populism, he said, was another recurrent theme in a large number of policy measures taken by the Government, with interest of society often being abandoned to achieve the personal purpose of those remaining in power. The evening saw the Prem Bhatia Memorial Trust Award for best political reporting of the year being awarded to the Indian Express Principal Correspondent in Patna, Varghese K. George, for his investigative series on how funds allotted for flood relief in Bihar were misused by authorities. Awarded for his reporting on the vanishing tiger population of the country was Jay Mazoomdar of the Indian Express, who received the Prem Bhatia Memorial Trust Award for best environmental reporting.

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