6
“IT is quite possible for this newborn democracy to retain its form but give place to dictatorship in fact. If we wish to maintain democracy not merely in form, but also in fact, what must we do? The first thing in my judgment … is to hold fast to constitutional methods of achieving our social and economic objectives.
“It means we must abandon the bloody methods of revolution. It means that we must abandon the method of civil disobedience, non-cooperation and satyagraha. When there was no way left for constitutional methods for achieving economic and social objectives, there was a great deal of justification for unconstitutional methods. But where constitutional methods are open, there can be no justification for these unconstitutional methods.”
The sagacity of this warning by the architect of India’s Constitution Dr B.R. Ambedkar in 1949 was proved true.
There is no reasoned debate in developing nations.
Only a decade later the world’s first democratically elected communist government in Kerala was ousted from power by massive street protests launched in complicity with the Congress government.
Socialist leader Jayaprakash Narayan, launched a campaign against a notorious Congress government in Bihar by mobilising street power, in 1974. On June 12, 1975, Indira Gandhi’s election to the Lok Sabha was set aside by Allahabad High Court. JP mobilised street power to force her to resign. A fortnight later, she struck back. An ‘internal emergency’ was proclaimed. A dictatorship was installed. Warnings delivered during colonial rule offensive to our ears by British leaders now proved to be painfully prophetic.
A former British prime minister A.J. Balfour told his niece in April 1925 “The whole essence of British parliamentary government lies in the intention to make the thing work. We take that for granted. … But it isn’t so obvious to others.
“These peoples — Indians, Egyptians, and so on — study our learning. They read our history, our philosophy, our politics. They learn about our parliamentary methods of obstruction, but nobody explains to them that when it comes to the point all our parliamentary parties are determined that the machinery shan’t stop. … But their idea is that the function of opposition is to stop the machine.”
The state of democracy in the entire Third World is none too inspiring. The electoral verdict is not respected. Parliament is held to ransom and the contest transferred to the streets.
There is no reasoned debate; only a show of street power in order to compel the elected government to quit and hold fresh elections. There is contempt for the citizen who is prevented from going about his normal business. The judiciary is ignored. It is a reckless use of sheer force in the form of street power with a spurious claim to legitimacy as ‘peaceful protest’.
The consequences are obvious. The rule of law is undermined, the democratic process thwarted. The rights of others, who differ with such tactics, are ignored.
A government that comes to power by such means cannot claim greater legitimacy than the one it ousted from power by undemocratic means. A precedent of grave consequences is set. By such erosion of democratic principles the entire constitutional system can eventually collapse. One of the foremost authorities on constitutional law Sir Ivor Jennings has defined in his Cabinet Government the respective roles of the government and the opposition.
What Jennings added is very pertinent today. “The function of parliament is not to govern but to criticise. Its criticism, too is directed not so much towards a fundamental modification of the government’s policy as towards the education of public opinion. …[T]he government governs and the opposition criticises. Failure to understand this simple principle is one of the causes of the failure of so many of the progeny of mother of parliaments and of the supersession of parliamentary government by dictatorships.” The US was rocked by demonstration of street power in the 1960s.
An able contribution to the debate was a pamphlet by Justice Abe Fortas of the Supreme Court entitled Concerning Dissent and Civil Disobedience.
Peaceful protest at an unjust system is one thing; witness Martin Luther King against racial discrimination. Street power for the overthrow of an elected government is altogether different.
Fortas said: that mass demonstrations “can take place without appreciable law violation, under absolute constitutional protection. But when they are characterised by action deliberately designed to paralyse the life of a city by disrupting traffic and the work of government and its citizens — they carry with them danger.
“…A programme of widespread mass civil disobedience, involving the disruption of traffic, movement of persons and supplies, and conduct of government business within any of our great cities, would put severe strains on our constitutional system.”
The US could endure it. The capacity of newly independent countries for such endurance is limited.
The writer is an author and a lawyer based in Mumbai.
Published in Dawn, January 31st, 2015
On a mobile phone? Get the Dawn Mobile App: Apple Store | Google Play
