It is not for us as observers either to commend or condemn acts of self-immolation by young boys and girls, many of them still in their teens, in protest against V.P. Singh’s decision to implement the Mandal Commission ‘report’. We can only try to understand the phenomenon and its possible implications.
We cannot commend self-immolation because we cannot possibly ignore the potentially horrendous consequences of this form of protest to the political order, especially because our political order is bound to remain under great strain even after V.P. Singh has been disposed of. But we cannot condemn it either. To do so would be to insult the memory and/or agony of those heroic boys and girls, who have chosen the most painful form of death in the service of a cause.
The legitimacy of the cause can be, indeed is, disputed. But even the Mandalites (or Mandalists) are not entitled to belittle the supreme sacrifice so many of our boys and girls have made, or tried to make. It speaks for the unbelievable insensitivity of some of our ministers and bureaucrats that they should engage in the ridiculous effort to make it out that a political ‘organisation’ is engineering the acts of self-immolation.
Ritualistic references to Gandhiji and invocations of his message of non-violence too do not become those of us – this means most of us – who have contributed to the rise of a ‘political order’ which understands, if it understands anything at all, the language of violence. The Mahatma has been dead for 42 years; we have certainly not heeded him at all since; in any event, men committed to the atomisation of the very Hindu society the Mahatma strove so valiantly to unite should leave him alone. They derive their inspiration from splitters such as Rammanohar Lohia and they should continue to swear by them.
They, however, are unlikely to oblige us. Political ritualism is useful as a form of escapism. It eliminates, or at least weakens, the obligation to face the reality and think hard and afresh. That of necessity is a painful exercise which the Raja and his commanders cannot wish to undertake. But it is not an exercise the rest of us can afford to avoid any longer. The hour of reckoning has arrived. The shrieks of boys and girls on fire, if not the raucous shouts of ‘hai hai’ and ‘murdabad’ should shake us out of our lethargy. This is not just another protest movement. India has not seen the like of it ever in its history.
To analyse the phenomenon itself, self-immolation is not a variant of suicide. While it too is the result of total despair, it speaks, not of personal anguish born out of personal difficulties, but of the hopelessness of a society, born out of its failure to master its destiny, on the one hand, and its unwillingness to accept the given irresponsible and unresponsive dispensation, on the other. The self-immolator represents at once the despair of his society with authority as well as its defiance of that authority; he or she confronts authority head-on; with himself as a flaming torch, he seeks to reduce to ashes seats of power in a moral sense. The self-immolator also appeals to the conscience not as much of the hard-faced men in power as of those who are inclined to be apathetic.
Psychological factors peculiar to the individual come into play in the case of the self-immolator as they do in the case of any other kind of martyr. Such men and women are never ‘normal’, whatever that may mean. Indeed, they make history by their very ‘abnormality’. They do not live in a world of their own. They react to the environment which they find suffocating beyond endurance. That is what concerns us primarily in the present discussion.
I have discussed the steady decay of our political order earlier in this space. The evidence of that decay has been piling for years in the shape of various kinds of agitations in Assam, the outbreak of terrorism in Punjab and Jammu & Kashmir and the Naxalite movement in Bihar and Andhra. But while the crisis of confidence in authority among our youth had so far been limited to certain regions, it has now spread to much of north India. This crisis of confidence is not limited to V.P. Singh and his supporters in the Janata Dal and indeed not even to other political parties which have chosen to prevaricate on the Mandal issue. It extends even to the Supreme Court. It may be painful for many of us to face this reality but it cannot in all honesty be shirked any longer.
It would only be fair for me to admit straightaway that I am not too well versed in legal-constitutional matters. I am, therefore, in no position to say with confidence that within the provisions of the Constitution as it stands, the Supreme Court could have issued a proper and regular stay order in respect of the official notification of August 13 on implementation of the Mandal Commission ‘report’.
1 have, however, little doubt that it would have helped mollify the students if the highest court in the land had granted a proper stay on September 21 when it first heard a petition to that effect, or at least on October 1 when it was approached once again by the Supreme Court Bar Association itself. Indeed, I would go further and contend that since the Supreme Court had called all references to high courts, some of which might have granted a stay order, to itself, it was its duty to do so, unless it was outside its competence, and that this obligation had been reinforced by the acts of self-immolation and violence following its supposedly ‘moral stay’ order on September 21.
Be that as it may, attempts at self-immolation by eight students in various towns the next day – incidentally Gandhiji’s birthday ‘celebrated’ with the usual ‘obeisance’ at Raj Ghat led by V.P. Singh – make it abundantly clear that the supposedly ‘effective stay’ has not served the intended purpose of assuring students that they will get justice from the Supreme Court.
It can well be argued that a few distraught young boys and girls cannot be said to represent the feelings of the larger community. On the face of it, this is a reasonable proposition. But I believe it would be a serious mistake to take it for granted. The truth of the matter is that the general confidence in the higher judiciary is not what it used to be in the seventies when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was seen to be trying to bash it up in a bid to subordinate it to her purposes. Incidentally, during the Emergency too, the general view was that some of the high court judges had stood up better against official pressure than the Supreme Court judges.
The higher judiciary has attracted a lot of adverse attention in recent months – the doings, real or imaginary, of five judges of the Bombay High Court, the uproar against them by members of the Bombay bar, and the controversy regarding the enormous expenses allegedly incurred by Justice Ramaswamy on furnishing his residence and so on as Chief Justice of the Punjab and Haryana High Court, for instance. All this could not but have brought down the higher judiciary in popular esteem.
These incidents may not, however, be wholly responsible for the widespread scepticism one encounters regarding the Supreme Court these days on the Mandal issue. I cannot identify the cause of this scepticism unless it goes back to the Emergency period; but I regard it my duty to record the fact. As a conservative interested in salvaging whatever is left of the institutional structure in the general havoc those in authority have been wreaking on it, I am alarmed by the sweep of this scepticism.
I was staggered when in an extremely turbulent political and economic situation in the summer of 1975, Justice Sinha, of the Allahabad High Court, set aside the election to Parliament of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on charges which The Times, London, compared to parking offences in Britain. In legal terms, he may well have been justified in doing what he did. But his judgement showed a disturbing lack of concern, in my view then and now, for political reality.
Justice Krishna Iyer, of the Supreme Court, too acted as a denizen of the proverbial ivory tower in debarring Indira Gandhi from exercising her right of vote in Parliament as an MP even as she continued to hold the office of Prime Minister. By the time Justice Iyer delivered his verdict in his characteristically florid style, the danger of a ‘constitutional coup’ should have been obvious to the meanest intelligence. Perhaps judges are there to interpret the laws and not the state of the union. Anyway Indira Gandhi proclaimed state of internal Emergency the next day. India has not recovered from the consequences over 15 years later.
I feel choked by a similar feeling of uneasiness and apprehension now. And I am aghast that the V.P. Singh government should have chosen to announce its decision to appoint Justice Misra as Chief Justice of India on the same day – October 1- that a five-member bench of the Supreme Court headed by him heard the petition for staying the August 13 notification.
It is, of course, utterly unfair to see a connection between the two events. But the fact, however unpleasant, has to be faced that such a connection is being made and the ruling by the bench that “identification of the castes by the National Front Government shall continue” for the purpose of the August 13 notification is being cited in support of the alleged link.
It is possible that the requirements of the Constitution in this regard are at odds with those of commonsense. But judged by the yardstick of commonsense this is a surprising view for the Supreme Court to pronounce in so many words. For one of the central issues in dispute is whether the “other socially and educationally backward classes” referred to in Article 15(4) of the Constitution can be equated with 3743 castes qua castes.
It would, perhaps, be a mistake to suggest that by implication, if not outright statement, the five-member constitutional Bench of the Supreme Court has already accepted V.P. Singh’s view that such an equation is legitimate. It cannot, however, be denied that the order is open to such an unfortunate interpretation.
Whether wilfully, or out of panic (fear of Devi Lal’s rally on August 9) characteristic of weak men, or under pressure of tough-minded individuals, V.P. Singh has opened the pandora’s box which the Supreme Court cannot be expected to close. Whatever its verdict, the issue is joined. No one can predict how the dispute will finally be settled. All that can be said right now is that it will be a long, long time before it is settled and that the cost to the Indian people of their folly in electing the Raja to the office of Prime Minister will be extraordinarily high. But it will be no mean gain if the Supreme Court is widely seen to rise to the occasion and thus becomes once again the repository of the hopes of those distrustful and apprehensive of the executive.
I for one regard Article 15(4) as an assault on the Constitution. It represents, in my view, an intrusion of the communist concept of ‘social engineering’ the consequences of which are evident enough in all communist-ruled lands, especially the Soviet Union. This is, however, a monster the Supreme Court cannot in fairness be expected to dispose of. But it can show the Mandal report to be what it has already been exposed to be – a fabrication with no relation to facts even to the extent facts regarding castes can be established on the basis of the 1931 census.
The testimony of experts associated with the Mandal Commission – Prof. Roy-Burman, Prof. M.N. Srinivas and Prof. Yoginder Singh – is conclusive enough. On top of it all comes the report of the Anthropological Survey of India which suggests that only 1051 castes can be said to qualify for the ‘OBC’ status against 3743 listed by Mandal.
The ASI’s is the most detailed report ever on the subject. It has taken five years for hundreds of qualified men and women to assemble the data. Surely it robs the Mandal fabrication of whatever plausibility it could earlier be said to possess. Mandal collapses in terms of his own definition of ‘backwardness’, and with him V.P. Singh and his casteist warriors. Surely it cannot be beyond the purview of the Supreme Court to rely on clearly established facts instead of fabrications based on Mandal’s own ‘intimate knowledge’.
Sunday Mail, 7 October 1990