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A perspective on law reforms

 Wandering between two

worlds, one dead,

The other powerless to be born,

With nowhere yet to rest my head,

Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.

— Mathew Arnold

Colonial India has been formally dead for six decades, but many of free India’s have-nots still have nowhere to rest their heads. Foreign and native tycoons are freebooting our swaraj resources, while countless indigents are traumatically left in the lurch. Revolutionary India, which has had its tryst with destiny, has been striving to be born as a hallowed Republic, but it has yet to incarnate as socialist, secular, democratic Bharat — excep t in solemn constitutional verbiage.

India that is Bharat has a variegated history and has seen several shifts in political power and state structure. The feudal-colonial culture under plural princely fiefdoms, followed by a satellite social order shaped by imperial Britain, has formally perished but actually survives after death. That is why the country is still crazy after an alien consumerist style of life with contempt for native austerity and sanity, and blinks, devoid of its nationalism, at the millions who are below the poverty line and lost in slum destitution.

Are we a toady, zany or flunkey of global big business bullies, while our legacy makes us the pinnacle of ancient vintage cultural heritage? If our government gives in to exotic dependencia syndrome, social, economic and political, our politicians are betrayers of people-oriented ‘development’. We are a non-violent battle-won sovereign nation, with a Constitution that is sublime and supreme. Its Preamble, with a dynamic paramountcy, declares that India is a socialist, secular, democratic republic. But this glorious status, currently in the grip of the greedy dollar and creamy native ‘moneyocracy,’ is gradually unfolding as a cultural flower, federal wonder and economic power. Our countrymen are coming to feel that ‘We, the People of India’ in their billion, not the grabbing bunch of billionaires and big business magnates, native and foreign, are the masters of Bharat. The hungry millions are never too marginal to matter.

Currently we are in this situation of grave contradictions, with a Constitution rich in its patriotic commitments but its reverse in its trinity of instrumentalities. Our slew of laws and lucre-focussed operators have a foreign flavour and developmental cosmetics. That is India’s crisis today. The laws that keep us colonial or suffer satellite status, denying us our crimson future, ought to be transformed. This should become a mission and a passion.

The conception and recent formation of a Law Reforms Commission in Kerala has an ideological, purpose-primed commitment, a democratic, legislative methodology and a nationally unitive, time-bound destination. It is a luminous step towards fulfilling swaraj. Our task is to use law, not mere executive action, to achieve this challenge of change.

This fundamental fulfilment is the sine qua non of our Constitution-founded Republic. Such a process will find its finest hour as a hard fact of impregnable integrity only if a militant humanist transmutation in the laws of India, beyond illusory placebos, is achieved. This articulation should be the thrust of any authentic law reform commission.

The Commission that has been appointed in Kerala is geared to these great goals as a pioneer in the field of socio-economic and related law reform experiments. The Commission’s theatre is provincial but its vision is national. Such ideational motivation and a noetic exercise ought to be the locomotive of any progressive commission of its kind.

Society without legality is barbarity. But law, to be promotive of order, preventive of chaos and productive of peace, must fill the bill of the preambular prescriptions, without which legal India may degenerate into a functioning anarchy, dismissing as brutum fulmen the developmental justice desideratum of the weaker sections of humanity.

Nehru’s historic words are apt here: “Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge not wholly or in full measure but very substantially. The service of India means the service of the millions who suffer, it means the ending of poverty and ignorance and decease and inequality of opportunity. The ambition of the greatest man of our generation has been to wipe every tear from every eye. That may be beyond us but as long as there are tears and suffering, so long our work will not be over.”

In another grand context Nehru observed: “I must frankly confess that I am a socialist and a republican, and am no believer in kings or princes or in the order which produces the modern kings of industry, who have greater power over the lives and fortunes of men than even the kings of old, and whose methods are as predatory as those of the old feudal aristocracy. But we must realise that the philosophy of socialism has gradually permeated the entire structure of society the world over and almost the only points in dispute are the pace and the methods of advance to its full realisation. India will have to go that way, too, if she seeks to end her poverty and inequality, though she may evolve her own methods and may adapt the ideal to the genius of her race.”

I beseech the Prime Minister, and the president of the ruling Congress, not to jettison the legacy of Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi. The imperative perspective of the Preamble obligates pragmatic legal engineering to validate the substantive constitutional propositions beyond vain verbosity. The Planning Commission was constituted precisely to evolve practical plans, policies and processes to liberate the country from proprietariat administration, impoverished villages of agrarian neglect and grimy slums sans human rights. We need an egalitarian haven of good life.

Indira Gandhi as Prime Minister nationalised certain industries and introduced several pro-Left policies and institutions. There has been no maternal change in the fundamental law to warrant a reversal of ideology, policy or praxis since the Nehru-Indira era. The Eleventh Planning Commission has shocked many informed jurists, sensitive statesmen and media nationalists by its pro-imperialist and anti-swaraj declarations of policy, bluntly violative of the Gandhi-Nehru essentials. Since 1991 these basic values were, by covert and cowardly shifts, undermined. Even the Supreme Court behaves with shaky constitutional imbroglio. Its oath-bound source of power is the diction of paramount law.

Every Law Reforms Commission in India must obey the socialist, secular philosophy. This is the alpha and omega of the Commission formed in Kerala, of which I am the Chairman.

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