Indian Republic at 75: Major hits and misses

AT the cusp of 75 years of India as a republic, I feel elated that our country remains a successful nation-state that commands a conspicuous presence in the community of nations. This, when the obituary of an impossibly diverse India was etched right at its birth by several international political science ‘experts’.

That the same was not unreasonable can be gathered from the fate of scores of newly independent nations of Asia and Europe which were much smaller in size, much less diverse and hence much more amenable to success as a nation-state, yet they failed.

The Constitution of India remains one of the very few among the constitutions of the newly independent Afro-Asian countries to survive this long, the other being the Japanese Constitution. We stand here as a stable democracy, an economic powerhouse, a military power in our own right and an emerging world power to reckon with. The journey has been long, arduous and eventful with great achievements and abject failures, as is the journey of any nation.

The sheer complexity of forging a stable national edifice requires the convergence of several factors such as geographical contiguity and accessibility, cultural homogeneity, economic unity and administrative commonality along with a team of leaders who possess robust expertise and honest intent, conditions that are not easily actualised.

Though the first few factors could be found in several nation-states, the last one has been a matter of serendipity. India was blessed to have a team of committed visionaries— the terms ‘team’, ‘committed’ and ‘visionaries’ all being crucial— who constructed a robust and lasting nation-state.

The only other team that came to mind was the stellar luminaries who founded the US. The nation and the Constitution, both have lasted nearly two and a half centuries and seem set for a long run.

Ideas and institutions

At its inception, the vast diversity of the country militated against the prevalent conceptions of the nation-state. Jawaharlal Nehru’s unifying shibboleth of “unity in diversity” weaved our immensely multicultural society into an abiding nation.

This was a popular rendering of the idea of fraternity enshrined in the Constitution of India and was to serve as the fountain spring that cultivated a sense of “belongingness” among its very many diverse populations.

The revolutionary ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity, and precursory notions of justice and the rule of law formed the bedrock of our Constitution. This constitutional ideology was intended to play a transformative role for a deprived and caste-ridden population in order to ensure human flourishing, or what Jawaharlal Nehru referred to as the “good life for the individual”.

The genius of this Constitution lies in providing for a detailed institutional framework to ensure that the aforementioned ideology is rooted deeply enough in Indian polity. A higher sanctity to fundamental rights, republicanism, separation of power, federal structure, secularism, etc., found detailed expression in the provisions of the Constitution in a manner that provided effective institutional safeguards for their perpetuation.

In any society governed by the rule of law, the institutional framework, i.e., laws, conventions, democratic and regulatory institutions, etc., provides resilience to the system.

The significance of institutional robustness can be gauged from the oft-quoted passage from Federalist 51, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and the next place, oblige it to control itself.”