Leadership Crisis in India - Continues Again

In my last post I had said that we shall look into why the leadership in the country has become what it is and how that impacts on democracy here. The last few days have provided enough instances to make my case. Due to the ongoing situation, my argument for the nth time emanates out of the Telangana tangle that goes unresolved and threatens to destroy the Osmania University once and for all. It is well known that the campus has become some sort of a hostile zone with pitched battles breaking out every once in a while. There are almost as many policemen on campus as there are students. A concerned citizen went to the High Court of Andhra Pradesh asking for the police to be removed. A Single Judge bench obliged. The Judge talked about how Telangana is not Pakistan and how the Osmania University entrances should not be barricaded like the Wagah border. I am a little amused by the choice of words of the esteemed Judge. Osmania University is not Telangana so the parallel is quite ludicrous. To liken the entrance to the Wagah border is confounding of an already confused situation. I am not questioning the learned Judge's judgement but simply drawing attention to a possible state of mind of all concerned about the Telangana issue and the State of Andhra Pradesh. But this is only an aside. What I thought was slightly amusing. The real issue is not the good Judge's vocabulary but the part that the judiciary plays in the politics and administration of the country.

This is the time that I shall have to bother you with some boring details about the constitution of India and the position of the judiciary accorded by it. There are three organs of government. The legislature, the executive and the judiciary. Baron de Montesquieu, a French man of great repute, propounded a theory of what he called Separation of Powers and what others call a system of checks and balances, where in order to protect the rights of common citizens, the powers of one organ of government are checked by the powers of the other two. The legislature is the law making body, the executive is the law implementing body and the judiciary is the law adjudicating body. This is a simplification of things but I do not intend to convert this post into a lecture on government. The interesting thing is that in countries like the United States of America all personnel into all three organs of government are elected (though some offices in the judiciary are not). Basically all three organs were supposed to create and protect the rule of law, where neither individual or office is more powerful than the law of the land. Rule of Law very clearly stipulates that no citizen of a country is above the law and therefore the expression the Rule of Law. In India too we have a rule of the law system but there are significant differences to be noted. First is that at no level are members of the judiciary elected. Second and equally important is that for the defining of guilt there are no juries. This aspect raises some questions about the nature of rule of law. I have repeatedly talked about rule of law without talking of what constitutes law itself. I shall immediately remedy that situation.

When human social groupings were still in tune with nature, laws of social conduct were derived from the laws of nature and therefore the basis of law in human society was cosmological, where the human being is just one part of a cosmos with no special status. With the passage of time and with the emergence of 'civilization' human beings slowly moved away from cosmology to religion where a God comes into being and the universe is treated as His Creation. In this religious system, the human being enjoyed a status that was higher than that of any other animal and the difference could be seen in the human being's ability to cogitate rationally to understand the rules of conduct laid down by God. Laws were dictates of God that had to be legitimated by holy books. These laws therefore could never be broken. With further 'progress' human beings appropriated unto themselves a status wherein it was believed that the universe was there for the pleasuring of the human species. Therefore all other forms of life were treated as necessarily inferior. This also meant that the human being without any compunction eliminates all forms of life at his/her convenience. Logging of trees, taming of animals, eliminating some animals calling them pests are representations of this line of thinking. I would like to say here that in order to cut a long story short I have eliminated a lot of subtleties but on the whole my rendition of the story is accurate.

To proceed with the story then, when the human being becomes the Master of the Universe, the perception about the origin of laws changes yet again. Law is now taken to be the outcome of rational deliberation on the part of citizens in society and it is therefore the rational and logical desire of people to live life in a certain way. The story is so far so good. But a problem comes into being at this juncture. If all laws are rational and deliberate expression of human will and if the legislature is the law making body, then true power or Sovereignty must lie with the legislature. The theory of checks and balances says that even the legislature cannot exceed limits and that will be determined by the judiciary. It is this problem that generates others. The judiciary has the power to brand acts of the legislature and the executive as being illegal. In India the judiciary is not elected by the people. The legislature and executive are. The elected bodies and their actions can be over ridden by an appointed body. Now put this is in the present situation. The executive acts in a certain manner and immediately the judiciary is invoked. The judiciary then goes on to 'direct' all institutions of administration into doing things. This is called judicial activism. One saw the emergence of this in Delhi when the Supreme Court of India directed the Delhi Transport Corporation and the Delhi government to run buses on CNG in order to clear the air of pollution. After that judicial activism has been on the rise. I was one of the people to support it since at least one organ of the government was still functioning.

Now I am a little alarmed by the intervention of the judiciary into everything. The last two months in Andhra Pradesh, one would be pardoned for thinking that it is the judiciary that runs the government and that the other organs are redundant. Students want permission to hold rallies on the Osmania University campus and the police promptly denies it. Some one goes to the High Court of Andhra Pradesh which overrules the police and gives permission. Another batch of students wants barricades removed, goes to court the court directs that they be removed with the comments that caused me a wee bit of amusement. In all this the executive is silent and one does not even know if it is functional. The legislature is dysfunctional since almost all legislators from Telangana and Andhra had resigned or has a suspended resignation in hand. Politics is no longer party based but region based. Telangana legislators vs Andhra-Rayalseema legislators. Really an unprecedented situation. Only once in the past in the 1990 when the V P Singh government had to prove its strength on the floor of the Indian Parliament, did one see a call for something like this. Ram Vilas Paswan called for legislators to cut across party lines and vote on the basis of their caste. That did not happen then, but the consolidation of legislators on two sides based on regions and irrespective of parties has happened in Andhra Pradesh. A most ludicrous situation which has neutered the legislature and the executive and given extra teeth to the judiciary, a body that is not even popularly elected. The Judges now run the government while the people's representatives lurk in the background to see what situation favours them. So for all practical purposes the happenings on the Osmania University campus are setting the agenda for politics in Andhra Pradesh and the proliferation of Joint Action Committees on the campus show that there is no one thinking there either. So what is facilitating this? In my next post I shall talk about some inherent problems in Liberal Democracy that get accentuated in the Indian context and make it possible for crises of this sort to emerge.