Jawaharlal Nehru was never tired of repeating the importance of nation-building. Taking over the reins of administration of a bruised nation in 1947, Nehru and his colleagues had a humongous task at hand: building a forward-looking nation out of a fractured polity. And that was possible only by keeping the nation engaged in the single task of common welfare, regardless of the mind-boggling differences. The spirit of antyodaya, or the welfare of the most underprivileged—that Gandhi zealously espoused during the Nationalist Movement—formed the basic ethos of Independent India.
Nehru distilled this sentiment in his Tryst with Destiny speech when he reaffirmed the new nation’s resolve to “wipe every tear from every eye”. He elaborated this idea in his inimitable style: “The service of India means, the service of the millions who suffer. It means the ending of poverty and ignorance and poverty and disease and inequality of opportunity.” Indeed, Nehru emphasises the ideal of social, economic and political justice, which the Constitution of India eventually solemnised in its Preamble. There is an unmistakable realisation in Nehru’s words and the Constitution that the idea of justice forms the bedrock of nation-building.
The policies and programmes of the nascent India under Nehru—be it building huge dams for power generation and irrigation, creating mega public sector undertakings in core sectors, or fostering a planned economy—were driven by the ideal of achieving social and economic justice. Today’s market economy messiahs as well as the know-it-all political leaders, who systematically vilify and often lampoon Nehruvian economics, are chronically myopic when it comes to history.
The act of nation-building takes place within the four dimensions of justice. The Preamble mentions three: justice, social, economic and political. But the fourth dimension of emotional justice plays a significant role too. The three other forms of justice will not get absorbed by the body polity if they are not accompanied by the emotional dimension. The pillar of emotional bonding was strengthened during the first 20 years of Independent India, making nation-building an achievable goal. But from the days of the Emergency, the nation-building project began to wobble and today, it has run out of steam.
All the four dimensions of nation-building are today in disarray. The trust of the religious minorities and the socially marginalised sections of the population has been shaken by disruptive and skewed policies and political action. The celebration of “a glorious Hindu past defiled by alien Muslim rulers” cannot help achieve cohesion and social justice! How can the praxis of cow protection and the umpteen instances of lynching be socially reassuring? The invoking of stringent laws to deal with dissent and criticism has resulted in waves of discontent and the feeling of alienation among socially vulnerable groups. Repeated instances of crass social injustice have already been damaging for the nation.
Economic justice, too, has become a mirage with the strengthening of a new corporate oligarchy and the ensuing economic disparities. The economic policies of the Central government believe in the presumed fairness of the market and capital. The government is slowly withdrawing from all social sectors to align with neoliberal economic principles.
Any talk about affirmative action or the entitlements of the poor and weak is bad economics in today’s India. The government’s spending on health and education as a percentage of the GDP has only gone down in the past nine years, despite the contrasting claims and announcements. Subsidies are viewed as an economic sin and mercilessly axed. With growing unemployment, inflation, price rise, the new labour laws and the clear stand against subsidies and welfare schemes, economic justice is a distant dream. Not to mention the agriculture sector which is in utter stress. The economic distress of the farmer, the anxiety of the wage-earning class, and the helplessness of the marginalised citizen—are getting worse by the day. What kind of nation-building is possible when economic justice is not only missing but seems to be a forgotten, forgettable ideal?
The political fissures and the prevailing sense of injustice are far too obvious for a recap. Of course, political justice is not the by-product of the same party coming to power at the Centre and the States. Political justice, despite political differences, can be achieved only through the role of strong institutions protected from the vagaries of power politics. But when such institutions are cleverly enfeebled and their autonomy systematically scooped out, political justice becomes an impossible ideal.
Several institutions that enjoyed a fair name for freedom and integrity have undergone such malignant mutations in recent history that political justice has been totally compromised. States ruled by opposition parties and coalitions are aggrieved either by the arbitrariness of the governors or the unfriendly acts of the Central government, as seen in the attitude towards the new Anna Bhagya scheme of the Karnataka government or the capping of the Kerala government’s borrowing limits. In such moral darkness, the project of nation-building wilts and withers.
Nation-building is possible only if there is a common consensus. When consensus is considered a weakness, how can this project survive? In today’s fractured emotional dimension, it is unsurprising that the Meities and Kukis have been fighting like enemies in Manipur for three months and the nation watches with sterile inaction or pretend-blindness. The emotional strands that hold diverse people together have been ruffled and snapped. Nation-building has regressed, and nation ‘culling’ has been silently endorsed as a preferred game. The State has no arms now to wipe the tears from the eyes of the poor.
K Jayakumar
Former Kerala chief secretary and ex-VC, Thunchath Ezhuthachan Malayalam University