By – Amar Yumnam
Imphal, Dec 23:
Recently I happened to watch an interesting video of George Bernard Shaw, which immediately reminded me of my literature teacher during undergraduate days in the Imphal College in the early 1970s – Oja G. C. Tongbra; Oja Tongbra is considered as the G. B. Shaw of Manipur. Other than memorising my teacher, in the video there is ample reflection of the power of humour. The power of humour is the ability to immediately inspire and instigate one to apply mind while at the same time making one laugh. In the video, Shaw, the Nobel Prize Winner, was stating that if he were to raise a toast in favour Napoleon, he could say “many flattering things” but he made the gathering burst in laughter when he said that it would have been better for the mankind if he were not born at all. The gathering further had the opportunity to explode in laughter when he uttered that Napoleon and his genre indulged in empire building while the scientists occupied themselves with creating universe.
Listening to the beauty – in the sense of the philosophical content and the wonderful orientation in favour of humanism – of the speech of G B Shaw immediately takes me into the nature of political orientation in today’s India to reduce everything to ONE – one nation, one people; one nation, one religion; one nation, one language; one nation, one in everything.
Recently, it was announced that there would be only one subscription in the digital format for the journals published around the world for all the educational institutes around the country. Now the question is: what is the priority of the country? Regular availability of power and access to the internet are still very unequal across the educational institutes of the country.
Further, majority of the students are deprived of the facilities and means for personal access to the digital world; the inequality in the capacity for access to the digital world is still very high. The scale at which the access to the digital world for academic purposes is something very different from possessing a mobile handset.
Now it has been announced that the admissions to the institutes of higher education across the country would be reduced to a Common Entrance Test. This way the colleges and universities across the country would be reduced to a Singular Institute. This would certainly reduce the role and the productivity of the institutes. Any society has a multiplicity of facets for advancement and the institutes of higher learning have to live up to serving the multiplicity of purposes and capabilities. We are aware of the fact that even within a single subject of study, no two universities are exactly similar in approach, understanding and advancing of knowledge. It is exactly the health or otherwise of this diversity which make a country different; viva le difference. The paths to justice are necessarily to depend on the contextual articulations emerging from the higher educational institutes of knowledge in the country.
Further, in the context of the ongoing social crisis in Manipur, the House of the People at the federal level was informed that the Head of the People of the federating unit was “cooperating” and thus the latter was not being disturbed on his position. It is exactly at this point that we need to reassert what Federalism is about. As Thomas Fleiner and Lidija R. Basta Fleiner put in Constitutional Democracy and Globalised World (2009) “Multicultural Federalism not only answers the question, how one should govern multicultural societies, but also, who should govern over whom. Federalism is thus a constitutional system which in its very nature aims at the prevention and peaceful management of conflicts within multicultural states.”They continue that “whoever analyses the smouldering intra-state conflicts resulting from multiculturality, will find many controversial answers to the following questions:1. Why does multiculturality inherently contain the potential for conflict?2. Can federalism and/or decentralisation contribute to bringing or holding multicultural societies together? Can federalism and/or decentralisation provide special tools and procedures to prevent or solve intra-state conflicts in fragmentedsocieties?3. The undisputed governmental system of the modern state is democracy. To what extent can a democratic society that is made up of several cultures regard itself as a single civil society, which legitimises and controls state power? Can a fragmented civil society only be united with additional political and legal instruments and procedures? The political and theoretical foundations of modern constitutionalism are based on the idea of the secularised state, which recognises only popular sovereignty and the social contract as the source of legitimate state authority. Political authority thus has its roots in the idea of the ‘Homo sapiens’. The man of modernity can say “no”, because he is capable of judging what is true, just and correct. Modern secularised democracy therefore presupposes that all people are in principle equal as:– egocentric beings (HOBBES); bearers of inalienable rights (LOCKE); reasonable citizens (in the sense of ROUSSEAU’S ‘citoyen’); exploiters or exploited (MARX);– political beings (‘homo politicus’ of ARISTOTLE and THOMAS AQUINAS); cost-benefit oriented beings (‘homo oeconomicus’ of ADAM SMITH, JOHNRAWLS).The democratic and liberal constitutional state of modernity is rooted in the idea that ultimately all people, as members of the species Homo sapiens, are substantially equal.” In the present Indian context, philosopher Shaj Mohan (2024) has put: “Democracy, Revolution, these are imperatives which imply each other. These are imperatives without imperators, without empires….Democracy is founded on the commitment to realise the freedom which is this: the power of each moment for the sake of the demos, that is people without exception…… In India, anastasis will be the creation of a democratic reality of the sharing of freedom by people without exception. The imminence of the revolution of democracy in India can now be felt like bass notes ringing in the distance, no matter where you are”.
Let me conclude with what Margaret Levi writes in Consent, Dissent and Patriotism (1997): “Empirically, political obligation rests on the citizen’s perception that government actors and other citizens are trustworthy. The activation of obligation implies institutional arrangements that make promises and commitments credible, but it may also require extraordinary acts of compensation to overcome distrust based on past experiences. It implies government decision-making bodies that are not only representative but actively considerate of the diverse wishes of the population. It implies membership in a community of citizens who possess some common norms and standards about what it means to reciprocate with each other.”
What are the realities and issues in the Indian context on the questions raised above? We need political, cultural, social and economic answers in a correlated manner to all these without further delay.
