Mahesh Daga The Times of India September 7, 2001
Democracy is premised on the idea of a moral, and not just political, equality of individuals. Nehru was naive, perhaps necessarily so, in thinking that he could create a modern democracy by way of a 'revolution from above' in which state institutions, backed by the liberal-democratic blueprint of a constitution, would have pride of place. Instead, what he ended up with was a hollow shell of state rhetoric-- from secularism to constitutional rights to directive principles-- expressed in a language which few internalised, even in his own cabinet. The challenge today, as it was in Nehru's time, is to find a new moral language which embodies the basic concerns of democracy but goes beyond his statist idiom.
INDIA EMPOWERED TO ME IS When armchair elite step out of their ivory tower, listen to real India MULAYAM SINGH YADAV The Indian Express Saturday, November 26, 2005
It has been around six decades since India emerged as a sovereign nation and a beacon of hope for the cause of the marginalized nations and communities around the globe. The most pertinent observation has been the emergence of internal colonialism, wherein brown sahibs replaced white sahibs, anglicized sections of India took over reins of the State and embarked upon an ambitious but lopsided programme of state building, leaving a vast section of the society marginalized, under-represented and suppressed. The Indian state emerged omnipotent and the bureaucracy carried out diktats of the elite which was still under the spell of the West. The common people voiced their disagreement for the first time in a very vibrant and organized manner after the Congress party’s tyrannical Emergency rule marked by imprisonment of innocent Opposition leaders for a period of over nineteen months.
Today we can claim with a sense of pride that there has been a ‘Silent Revolution’ in India’s political spectrum with political monopolies being broken and commendable changes taking place in the socio-economic sphere. The subordination of the rural agrarian sector to urban industrial society has been done away with the rise of the leadership of backward classes who succeeded in placing the contribution of rural peasantry in the collective consciousness of the nation. This has been marked by corresponding changes in the breakdown of the Congress party’s patron-client system wherein the marginalized got a chance to cast their ballot but hardly got a chance to be elected. Empowerment has been made meaningful with the democratization in the villages with redistribution of land, fair representation of all the sections of the society and strong measures against any form of oppression.
The resounding defeat of Lalu Prasad Yadav in the Bihar election is a landmark. It constitutes the rejection of an ideology that had become perverted and, equally, it marks the popular rebuff of an astonishing undemocratic mentality. Lalu was always a colourful politician. But behind the buffoonery there lurked an unacceptable element of recklessness. He ostensibly stood for “social justice”, a relevant aspiration in the context of a deeply fragmented and hierarchical Bihar. However, his practice of affirmative action was both whimsical and perverse.
He sought to replace an existing, and deeply iniquitous social pyramid, with a new hierarchy that placed Yadavs and Muslims as the new ruling caste. He lacked the inclination and the temperament to accommodate the social and economic yearnings of either his loyalists or the new outcasts. For Lalu, time stood still. In recasting the power hierarchy in the villages, he blanked out the monumental changes in the rest of India. Consequently, he kept an already backward Bihar frozen in the early-’90s and prevented market forces from intruding into the state.
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