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For a resurrection of the rule of law

Bedlam abiosis distorts Law India today. It deadens the survival strategy of the country’s millions of have-nots. It stultifies and reduces to a cipher the lofty values indefeasibly vested in every Indian by the Constitution. Why is the rule of law going berserk? Why has the legal system suddenly suffered a disaster syndrome vis-À-vis the countless masses? Why has it jettisoned the people-oriented constitutional jurisprudence, obliterated the preambular emphasis on social justice, and egregiously gagged and goofed economic egalite and democratic politics?

Why is poverty jurisprudence jejune and judicial jurisdiction an arcane, expensive and unapproachable process for the have-nots? Why has the state, in its trinity of instrumentalities, executive, legislative and judicative, forsaken the billion-plus Indians and surrendered its patronage to a few native philistine billionaires and alien investment barons from multinational corporations?

Where is Nehru’s non-alignment policy gone? And how has the Manmohanomic nuclear deal with an authoritarian President George Bush occupied Indian treaty space without express parliamentary approval? History has put Gandhiji, Nehru and Indira Gandhi in its faded pages because later pro-American non-nationalist successors to the high office have subverted the basic ideology of swaraj. Will Bharat, when it wakes up, forgive Dr. Manmohan Singh for forgetting non-aligned Nehru, his allergy to imperial powers and his socialist perspective? Nuclear power reactors that employ fission from uranium technology represent pan-planetary terrorism, a potential national disaster with perennial radiation pathology. And nuclear waste is a noxious and die-hard menace.

If Mahatma Gandhi is not utterly irrelevant, if Indian cultural values are not mere vanity of vanities, nuclear fission is no development at all. The U.S. nuclear power barons have no more business in America after the Three Mile Island accident. How, then, are they to buy business? The business of America is business, said President Calvin Coolidge. They must find business in obedient India; and the global browbeater is Mr. Bush, who mandates Bharat to buy before he quits the White House.

The Gandhian concept of development rejected the idea that it should aim primarily at the creation of armed might, material wealth or the satisfaction of insatiable, endlessly multiplied needs. “Insofar as we have made the modern materialistic craze our goal,” Gandhiji wrote, “so far are we going downhill in the path of progress.”

The poor have touched the nadir, while the rich have reached sinister heights. How come our agriculture has suffered, despite all the fertilizer, all the land reform and the employment potential that it holds out? Imports from the subsidised U.S. farmers are hostile to swadeshi. Why has pollutive industrialisation with aggressive profit-making become the cynosure of toxic state policy? How egregious a blunder it is that solar power, wind and wave energy, hydel power generation and so on are the Cinderella of energy swaraj, while the Central government hankers after disaster-prone, high-cost nuclear reactors with deathly radiation and nuclear waste terrorism potential?

The signing away of our poorna swaraj under pressure from Bush raj is an act that remains an enigma. Prime Minister Nehru told President Eisenhower in bold and plain words that India is not an international mendicant for arms. Rajaji, the wisest man of the East in his time, met President Kennedy to plead against American nuclear tests.

It was a sublime appeal by a foremost patriot of sagacity, for the survival of mankind. Why, then, should Dr. Manmohan Singh, a straightforward statesman who once worked for the World Bank, have travelled to the White House to embrace the international law-breaker Mr. Bush and, with bizarre affection assure him that the Indian people love him? Why should he do this without consulting Parliament or the people, while large political parties are opposed to his pro-U.S. nuclear policy?

Something rotten somewhere remains unrevealed behind this terminological inexactitude. Dr. Manmohan Singh is a vulnerable leader. Does he, true to his constitutional oath, tell the world that he is the Prime Minister of a socialist, secular, democratic, republic? Nehru and Indira Gandhi would have readily done that. Perhaps he is weak on this ground, although personally I hold his integrity in esteem. It is a dubious proposition that the executive has absolute power to sign treaties without Parliament’s sanction or supervision.

This country, since 1991 and more so in recent times, has been a victim of ubiquitous consumerism, widespread corruption, extravagant imitationism, rabid communalism, creamy layer class-bias, and a five-star lifestyle. And the horror of it all, spiralling inflation, impregnably aggressive, deprives the poor of the right to life while the state remains indolent. Prices remain uncontrolled, traffic is terrorism in locomotion, the roads are narrow with parked cars blocking space, and the rich, with their luxury limousines, privatising the streets.

The state is pachydermic, the courts are logomachic, mindless of the rights of the many and unconcerned with the lawlessness and violence of the freebooters, fanatics, big business dealers in ‘godism’ and traders in theology. The law is dead for the weaker sections. Humanism is anathema and compassion an allergy. A resurrection of the rule of law is the cry of the hour. Every person, please remember, is his brother’s and sister’s keeper. There is dastardly mega-violence everywhere, including state aggressiveness.

To assume that money means more than man is the sign of a degenerate culture. The Gandhian thesis of ‘small is beautiful’ is no longer valid in life and law. Globalisation, privatisation, marketisation, Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights, Trade Related Investment Measures, Technical Regulations Information System and other deleterious international conventions, agreements, declarations and treaties signed or approved by the executive make Parliament impotent while it should be paramount.

The right to life of the little Indian shines in print in the suprema lex, but the Constitution remains a petrified parchment. The courts are too costly, dockets are astronomical in number, and justices, with their limitless contempt power, are often a menace to free speech. The media have their own pro-proprietariat policy. In short, Indian jurisprudence ignores the indigent and offers no access to the underprivileged. Social justice empowerment and the work, wealth and happiness of every human being are integral to the basic structure of Law India. This grand objective now buried in the graveyard of current jurisprudence desiderates a stupendous effort at law reform. A glorious, militant performance by the reform commission with a vision and a mission is the challenge before the country.

This essay argues for a perennial law reform operation so that India and its people may not suffer seppuku, and made bankrupt by big business freebooting.

Socialism, once dear to Nehru, Indira Gandhi and the Leftist statesmen, has suffered a death sentence under the programmatic wonder (and blunder?) of the otherwise great Dr. Manmohan Singh and Sonia Gandhi, who proclaim to the contrary to Bush and Co. The embracing of Mr. Bush, whose international law is arrogant ukases ad libitem, marks vanishing point of socialism, secularism and authentic democracy. It is the riddle of the unwarranted assertion that India loves, and not hates, the bizarre Mr. Bush.

Lord Scarman said: “You will all remember the famous saying that war is far too serious a matter to be left to the generals. We in England think that it is possibly also true that law reform is far too serious a matter to be left to the legal profession.”

There are many politicians and parties whose soul is sold to a different developmental destination than the one silhouetted in the Constitution. My final word and warning is Robespierre’s caveat: Any law which violates the indefeasible rights of man is essentially unjust and tyrannical; it is not a law at all.

The Indian situation is best expressed in an anonymous poem from America Inc. It best represents the distortion of our rule of law:

The law locks up both man and woman

Who steals the goose from off the common,

But lets the greater felon loose

Who steals the common from the goose.

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