Democracy in Global Life

How “our relationship with the earth is different” was described also by Adivasi Indu Netam in WSF 2004 (in debates on Adivasi identities and survival) as follows:

“We can not sell it”, the earth, because “land or water are value in itself” (Indu Netam). They do not get their value in their capacity to become exchanged (into money); the value exists in land itself as life-giving element prior to its option of being exchanged (by money or exchange value).

“We cannot eat money” noted the Konds of southeastern Kalahandi on in Orissa, where they have been forced to sell their lands for bauxite mining (report by F. Padel and S. Das on 9.2.2004 about bulldozed tribal villages at Lanjigarh).

“Water and land… are… equated with life”, and as was noted by Tilka Manjhi, (a leader of Adivasi civil society in the 18th century), “the land is given to us by Sing Bonga (the Sun God). There can be no tax on land, nor can it be bought and sold”. (“Indigenogracy - People’s Alternative to Globalization” by JUDAV)

“Food, which can not be eaten but sold” is not real food, when the “forests from which we got bambu to eat are sold by the government to the transnational corporations”. (Adivasi Indu Netam about Adivasi survival and identities on 20.1.2004, Mumbai). “We do not want money but land and to cultivate and use it” (a Adivasi representative in a Paiga village in tiger reserve of Chhattishgarh on 27.1. 2004).

Where right to food is categorical for all modes of life, right to profitable private commercial property is only a culturally relative right in relation to various other cultural forms of property or economic rights to resources. For Adivasi culture “land entitlement and ownership came problems only after the law” given on land ownership by the government (Adivasi leader in a forest village Pandu-tribe in Chhattishgarh on 25.1. 2004).

As forms of right to people’s ‘own means of subsistence’, all forms of possession and property have to be determined primarily as means of cultural heritage of human subsistence and survival. In culture of Adivasi, when “we are forced away from the lands” and “even if the government would give us money to get our lands, we do not want money, but our land which is our only way to live” (Indu Netam, Mumbai, 20.1.2004).

Land is “basic to their existence as such and to all their beliefs, customs, traditions and culture” and “is not merely a possession and a means of production”, “not a commodity which can be acquired”.

“Traditional collective systems for control and use of land and territory and resources… are a necessary condition for their survival” and fulfil “intergenerational” responsibilities on “identity, survival and cultural viability”. (UN-report “Indigenous peoples and their relationship to land”, paragraphs 16 and 19-20)

Tribal user rights can be seen rather as use of space; not as property but as rights to use certain things or situations in a certain way inside certain demarcation. (Suresh Sharma on 29.3.2004, Delhi).

Indigenous lands and habitats have been possessed as their ‘own’ in a wider and more collective sense, and still more intimately binding and more unic sense ‘as their own’, than any exchangeable commercial property.

“Relations to the land are not merely a matter of possession and production but a material and
spiritual element… to preserve their cultural legacy and transmit it to future generations”. (UN-report on Indigenous peoples’ permanent sovereignty over natural resources E/CN.4/Sub.2/2003/20, paragraph 16). “Land was considered as a mother that feeds innumerable living beings on the earth”. “Now land is a commercial entity and the poor and marginalized are slowly alienated from it”. (I.P. Jeevankumar, ATWT-director, Tamil Nadu, 2004).

“Land is nobody’s own but is a in the form trusteeship of the community... It cannot be purchased a commodity as it has with it the emotional and spiritual value”. “The community is the trustee of the land and different household are provided only usufructory rights. Land is respected and is never considered to be a commodity. This again is for the simple reason that they have spiritual and emotional value of lands and are afraid that the respective spirits would be unhappy if they are treated otherwise”. (“Redeeming the World Order - The Adivasi perspective”, WSF-publication by Indian Confederation of Indigenous and Tribal Peoples)

4.2. Indigenous Heritage of Land Consumed into a World Proper for White Men

“The introduction of the practice of attaching a monetary value to things and of buying and selling things previously considered non-merchantable, including land, added the stress of an economic environment quite opposite to the traditional economic order of most indigenous communities”.

The modern concepts of property, law and modern governance under which lands were taken “were all alien to the collective social organization of indigenous communities” who lived the lands. (UN-report “Indigenous peoples and their relationship to land”, paragraphs 19- 20 and 22.)

For white men, such “distance and discontinuity between the known and unfamiliar was… located in … similarity with a known remote past” and to control it, “colonial governance of a barely known and unfamiliar land had… to render it in some measure known and familiar” for governing it. Thus for historical progress “it was imperative that the ‘facilities of communication’ be effective enough to forever shatter the remoteness of this hinterland” under the properties of the world, which is proper for white men. (Suresh Sharma; “Tribal Identity and the Modern World”, pages 64-65 and 114)

Globalization continues the colonial conquest of the distance of indigenous land, identity and heritage by homogenizing modern ‘communication’ as the control of distance. By its telecommunications and
connections; motorized vehicles, roads, electricity, media, translation mechanics, i.t., etc. -, the modernity strengthens its global control to sell and buy distance and dignity.

By these means land continues to be taken illegitimately from Adivasi by ‘internal colonialism’, controlling indigenous life through “alien and … destructive concepts of State ownership of forests and private property of land, which… laid the foundation for the expropriation of tribal wealth which continues until the present day”. (Harsh Mander; “Tribal Policy”, 2004, page 9)

“The search for areas to exploit has led States and transnational corporations to enter into agreements to sell the land where indigenous peoples live, from which they are then evicted…. to exploit the natural resources of the indigenous peoples” by “dispossession without compensation”.

“Today, we are witnessing a process of private colonization” whose “objective is profit and… ownership over assets acquired by fraudulent means”. “Confiscation transformed into right of ownership with all that this entails” makes also globally the “current situation… a legacy of colonial history” and the “very existence of indigenous populations… endangered”. “States,… when organizing land transfers, often resort to expropriations, forcible clearance and savage… to satisfy the requirements of international companies whose profits flow abroad”. (UN-report on Indigenous peoples and Globalization, paragraphs 3, 5, 7,10, 15, 18 and 33)

‘Discoveries’ of lands and resources have happened by drawing new administrative boundaries to a map or to the user rights of lands. So often “indigenous peoples’ territories and lands do not… follow State, provincial or other administrative boundaries”. These illegitimate settings of new boundaries and rules continue to “divide commonly held indigenous land and allot land to individuals or families” “to use their land as collateral for loans” (etc.). They “weaken the indigenous community… and… result in the eventual loss of most or all of the land” and “decline in resources available to indigenous peoples”. (UN-report on Indigenous peoples and their relationship to land, paragraphs 74, 80 and 122). “The legal system is systematically misused to harass and tire out tribal litigants, most of who despair and become weary or are pauperised before the almost unending legal battle reaches its conclusion”. “Presiding officers of courts frequently do not wish to alienate the powerful lobbies of the bar” and often Adivasi “pledge their person and sometimes even that of their families against a loan”.
“It is not unusual for bondage to persist until death, and to be passed on as a burdensome inheritance to subsequent generations”. “Auctioned land is purchased by non-tribals” (Harsh Mander; “Tribal Policy”, 2004, pages 13 and 18)

The significance of land - how land actually signifies what it is - results from inheritance of millenniums of perceptibility of the earth and the surroundings, developed by living in these surroundings; distinctively by the indigenous heritage which lived in these surroundings.

The inheritance of what land signifies now in world’s immediate sense-perceptibility, and in all what is perceived to take place ‘upon the earth’, is thus to a distinctive extent an indigenous inheritance by its origin also for the whole humankind.

The modern world consumes indigenous heritage and significance of what land is into properties on matters proper for modern demands to be owned through global exchange for modern values of sense consumption.

In accordance to the scientific discovery of the laws of Nature as the heartbeat of the modern control of the world, all environment is forced to re-emerge in various senses as such ‘properties’ of matters, which are made ‘proper’ for being owned by modern scientific observation.

All what the word ‘Nature’ is able in its currently patented prevailing sense to mean, consists inextricably of the scientific laws of Nature, as observed by scientifically discovered ‘intellectual’ properties of a scientific white man and his science. All what surrounds, becomes thus authorized and determined as properties of what is to be ‘intellectually’ or materially ‘proper’ for modern scientific observation and application.

World’s objective observability as intellectually proper to modern scientific man is authorized by modern science of Nature. Laws of ‘intellectual’ properties on Nature, create such “enclosure of the environment” which “denies sustainable survival option for those who sustain the environments… particularly indigenous people”. (Anubhuti newsletter 2003, Anubhuti Publications, Orissa, India, page 39).

Indigenous cultural refinery of growing land is consumed as material or intellectual properties, ‘discovered’ or produced as ‘modifications’ monopolized by a modern world, proper to white man.

White man thus observes himself entitled to tax the salt of the sea and grainseeds as they drop into soil or to ‘modify’ the results of indigenous cultural refinery of forest into properties discovered or produced by a world proper, for white man. ‘Modifications’ of maize, potato, or tomato, the origin of which world got from American Indians without compensation, are now monopolies of US corporations, who are enacted to charge high compensations from anyone using these species in certain ways.

Land, as surrounding perceptibility, is mainly indigenously inherited significance, but is however thus now widely consumed into the properties of a world proper for modern scientific man.

Nature (of science) is a world controlled for treating immediately all as consumable into western (physical or literal semantic) senses to get rid of the pains and “curse of mediacy” of endless cultural variety of the forms and senses of perception and significance of “an unflawed mode of comprehension”:

By “the systematic reconstruction of a mental universe wherein ‘true forms of objects’ would stand forth accurate and unshakably firm in language uncontaminated by ‘forms of thought’”(Suresh Sharma; “Tribal Identity and the Modern World”, page 72).

Such language of uncontaminated objectivity is the form of modern official language of literal significance with correctly syntactical official translatability into juridical controllability of intentions and intentional structures.

Any community can communicate itself into commonly understandable common matters, intentions and positions for decisions, only among those whose language and intentions are effectively translatable into shareable structures of significance.

4.3. Decisive Vernacular Locality of the Land

People’s equal participation by their own intentions, language and structures of sense to the decisions, which affect them is precondition of just rule to allow people to affect the decisions of power structures according to that how their basic rights will be affected by these structures.

It is undemocratic, if the decisions of those, who can more ‘effectively communicate’ within given modern nation-state structures of community and its decision making, are allowed to affect the life of other peoples, who are not provided equal means of effective communication in formation of those decisions.

The illiterate indigenous modes of life, which were the most general ones in the most parts of the world before colonization, became subordinated under the foreign structure of literal significance in all powers of science and modern governance by the control of facts.

The locality of land’s own senses and means of its life’s renewable subsistence is decisive in more equal, more adequate and more sustainably economic way (than short-term commercial growth) for land’s life and for leading the life in a land as sovereign, permanent and non-exchangeable life of the land. Communities have created common justice on common use of resources in accordance to such local senses, which are adjusted for the specific conditions of what is right sense to live in the land they live.

As this locality, what land’s life is by its vernacular significance, is decisive for the majority, why is it excluded from being decisive for that how the life of land is led; why is it excluded by making literal globalizable significance to be the decisive significance in laws and in all management of life ?

Most decisive in governance of every land has to be the significance of the free intentions of land’s life and people who live the land.

How such significance of what is ‘to live’ in this land, is allowed to lead the life of the land freely by intentions of land’s life (as far as these do not remove equal rights of others), has to be decisive for the justice of life on any land.

As “the continuum of freedom for all life on earth”, “Earth Democracy is the democracy of all life”, “Earth Family”, ‘Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam’, to “protect life… basic needs and economic security to all” by “birthrights given by the fact of existence on earth” and “best protected through community rights and commons”. (Vandana Shiva; “Earth Democracy, Living Democracy”, 2002).

Fundamental unit and integrity of democracy requires such locality of people, who have common identity of language, communication, sense and treatment of matters to get them commonly identifiable and designed for common dialogue and decisions.

As less commercial and less literal senses and means of life, which are most decisive for the life of the majority, are excluded from that how things are decided, the structures of the prevailing formal ‘modern democracy’ in decision-making are unequal and undemocratic.

Those forms of community, communication, matters and decision-making, which are most adequate to reflect ‘the will of the people’ are different in different lands and depend on that mode of relations between people, which is called the civil society. Only this kind of society is able to treat common matters by equally free communicative means, can be democratically governed.

In democracy people should be able to guide the decisions on their life equally by their own forms of community, language, understanding, treatment of matters, communication etc. - and not by any such forms which have been forced on them by material power (colonialism, forced commercialization, etc.)

Life of lands can be led equally as far as that what is decisive for what happens to the land in its life, is based on senses and significance of each land’s own intentions of its life.

Such locality of land’s life survives in its vernacular significance as decisive in what land’s life is for the majority. Why is it then excluded from being decisive by making literal globalizable significance to be the decisive significance in laws and in all management/governance of life ?

How would the locality of land’s own senses and significance of its life be decisive in a more equal and more globally adequate way for the life of a land and thus for leading the life in a land?

That “how the cosmos and the local” are together in indigenous life, constitutes more cosmic position than the global physical world. As the tribal locality is cosmic, there is no such opposition of local and global as there is in the “fragmented world view in the west”. Where indigenous means the rootedness into land’s life, the modern perceptibility of ‘Nature’ and its globalizable literal significance are institution of “science which uproots” and “becomes an instrument of power”. The rural sense of indigenous and peasant life is by its ethos more equal, more human, more empathetic, modest and “more cosmocentric” than the west, which is “more anthropocentric” and instrumental with the “arrogance of power”, where “95% of the world’s scientists are connected to war industry”. (Interview of B.K. Roy Burman).

Is the practice of justice a notional ideal or does it emanate from the logic of locality and proximity? Similarly, what impact does locality have on the nature of social structures, relationships and hierarchies; on jurisprudence, equality, rights and freedom? Is there an equation in Adivasi life between land and knowability, between locality, equality and justice? Is it only the proximate that can be known and addressed to in terms of social justice?

What is land as that shared locality of perceptibility and sense of access to livable surroundings, which is decisive for what the land and its life are and thus decisive for leading that life?

Is land (and its locality) a metaphor for the known and a mediating space between the known and the unknown? What significance do land and its locality have in defining community, epistemology and ontology as also modes of governance and sustainability thereof?

How do the plural and unique worldviews and relationships with animate or inanimate surroundings nurture the universal inclusiveness and dignified co-existence?

As the modern world uses (and concentrates) globally more energy than any other culture to implement democracy around the world, it however produces globally more unequal and undemocratic life than any other culture, then:

In which ways have the communities and cultures of Adivasis and other communities of marginalized majority lived a life of more equality and of lesser conflict than the modern democratic state governance?

In Adivasi life, sharing has been a source of self-respect. “When they made a hut they will co-operate… if they are to produce something they are producing together, if they are to collect the foods they are collecting together… the needs were very small”. “It was a good society”, but it had it horrors like witch-hunt, which must be corrected even by help of modern world. (Adivasi Indu Netam, her presentation in seminar in 29.3. 2004 and her interview 30.3.2004, in Delhi)

“Inherent principles of equal and uniform use of land-labour-resources for livelihood, shared consumption of food, shelter.... The social and cultural lives of these communities were based on the principles of co-existence for survival that possibly promoted equality and conflict free living among the group or tribe” “Indigenous communities are the forerunners in forming the idea of social and autonomous living which now has plurality of conceptual understanding and meaning... The tribal and indigenous forms of social life were a joint-conception and was practiced through a system that identified itself with the survival of all and its relative dependency on the environment. .. The solace and peace the indigenous communities enjoyed were possible only through a shared living”. (I.P. Jeevankumar, ATWT-director, Tamil Nadu, 2004)

4.4. Anchoring Indian State and Polity to Vernacular Wisdom : A Small Step Towards Swaraj

By Arun Kumar Panibaba

Democracies and representational systems everywhere in the world, not in India alone are going through a crisis. But India’s political system appears to be on the brink. The crisis does not seem to be untrue. Whatever be the nature of its present, does India have a future?

Anyay has become all pervasive in Indian politics and society during the last fifty years. The ‘sacred’ constitution enacted after independence was without any discourse about nyay-anyay. Even minimum act of legislation, i.e., discourse and dialogue against anyay has remained suspended since long. The manner in which legislative business is carried out in our Parliament and Vidhan Sabhas is indicative of a novel exercise, of organising democracy without discourse or even a minimum debate. Whatever little government is being carried out is on an ad-hoc and arbitrary basis. It would not be impertinent to point out that the legislative faculty of the Indian society and its people has been extinguished since long, perhaps many centuries.

The founding fathers of the Indian republic overwhelmed by independence from the British and the accompanying partition, faced with the critical process of unifying a ‘modern nation state’ out of the 554 scattered princely fiefdoms, a score of colonial territories and the debris of an ‘imperial’ administration perhaps could not appreciate the delicate equilibrium of India’s diversity and tradition. Conceived in this way, the republic’s constitution (designed as the prototype of the West Minister model) manifests failures (not denying success stories in preserving the unity of the nation and sustaining electoral democracy) in power sharing, both vertically and horizontally. Hence the multifaceted crises of confidence and loss of mutual trust. It is no ordinary tension. The nation state appears to be threatened.

Even with the handicap of such a constitution, such crises could have been avoided, had political parties displayed some ingenuity in responding to the needs of a plural society and by instituting mechanisms of horizontal and vertical power-sharing in a parliamentary democracy.

Etiologically, the malaise of Indian politics can be traced to the failure of political parties in evolving internal democracy as well as structures and for a to resolve disputations of ideology and power sharing both horizontally and vertically. It is not an ordinary failure. Nonetheless, this critical aspect of India’s political genius needs to be analysed both in the context of the Westminster model of parliamentary democracy and also with reference to the social psyche of a people who have remained without an initiative for a long time.

It is rarely appreciated by our social scientists that centralism is a strong tendency of the British parliamentary ‘democracy’. A brief study of the authoritarian characteristics of the office and person of India’s successive Prime Ministers and numerous Chief Ministers makes it obvious that Thatcherism and Nehruism were neither personal failings or aberrations but were a natural flowering of the Westminster type of parliamentary democracy. In this model, centralization of political power (authoritarianism) is a natural outcome of the atomisation of the decision-making authority in the form of universal suffrage. The notion of ‘collective responsibility’ is always in proportion to the goodwill of the leader of the government. The manner in which a Rajiv Gandhi or a V.P. Singh or a Deve Gowda became endowed with a gigantic aura of wisdom and an absolutist power must be analysed in the context of the systemic characteristics.

The problematique is further compounded when party structures are virtually controlled by small-sized cabals entirely on an ad-hoc basis. This situation is further compounded by the deeply entrenched caste-system of social organization, very suitably used by supreme leaders to promote incompetence and corruption in very high political offices.

Looking analytically, as a political worker, one can say that the problems of Indian polity cannot be resolved either by the introduction of the Dinesh Goswami report on electoral reforms or by working on the Sarkaria Commission on administrative reforms or by implementing the B.B. Vohra committee recommendations (which suggested breaking of the nexus between criminals and politicians). Direct legal provisions pertaining to political reforms or curbing corruption cannot make up for the structural gaps in the political system. There is a need for a single package to tackle the ills of our polity. Any attempt at piecemeal solutions is likely to enlarge the processes of manipulation. The principle of political organisation has to be woven within the web of constitutional structures of state-craft.

The current political crisis is only a manifestation of deeper malaise of ‘governance without politics’ which India has been suffering from since early 1970’s. In most of the country, there is no political governance. And whatever little ‘government’ exists, is essentially without discourse and primarily bureaucratic, which is exercised mostly arbitrarily. A fact which is hardly understood by our academics or social activists.

Democratic institutionalism of decision-making process has been abandoned for long. Almost all politics seems to have been replaced by ‘judicial activism’. The spate of ‘public interest litigations’ and governmental dependence on ‘judicial assistance’ is astounding. It is at once indicative of the fact that both the legislative and executive arms of the state have been severely paralysed because of the systemic failure of the entire body politics. The unthinking manner in which the judiciary has long been entertaining the governmental pressure for ‘assistance’ shows the judiciary’s ignorance about its limited authority and sanction in the constitutional parameters. It must be remembered that judiciary in India is career-oriented and is mostly dependent on the political government. Therefore any over-reliance on ‘judicial activism’ can be disastrous. The simple manner in which the High Court has upheld appeals on some of the Hawala accused is a serious pointer.

The failure of political parties to practice a modicum of internal democracy is difficult to understand. Why should it have been impossible for a Shankar Singh Vaghela or a Ramakrishna Hegde to continue in their respective parties, which they had nursed to power by a great and long personal sacrifice? Why is our leadership incapable of ensuring functional democracy and sharing power within party structures? Why is the stranglehold of the so-called central leadership (an apex caucus) so choking that any democratic dissent cannot breathe within the party system?

The anti-defection law is yet another mockery of democracy and a killing blow to the soul of parliamentarianism. Whatever the intent and content of this bad law might have been, it was put in the deep-freeze more often than needed. Chandrashekhar was made Prime Minister in total violation of this law. Ayaram-Gayarams like Ajit Singhs and Shanker Singh Vaghelas have all flourished despite this law.

Legislation is nothing but a process of Samvaad. It is a process of resolution of conflict through dialogue. Anyay begins where samvaad (dialogue) ends. As long as there is a dialogue between parties involved in a transaction / conflict, possibilities of nyay exist. A father can beat his son and still not do anyay. A husband and wife can exchange hard and hot words but still not do anyay to each other. But the moment one of them says that there can be no dialogue and only separation, the process of justice comes to an end. Justice is a mutual category. Justice and injustice is delivered between two parties on a mutual and personal basis. Samvaad heenta (absence of dialogue) is the genesis of anyay. This Samvaad heenta has now spread to all levels of society, from family, clan, and community to national legislature.

The prevailing political system has resulted in intensification of Samvaad heenta and modes of anyay. However, the same system has saved us from a Kauravi Kutti (absolute absence of dialogue resulting in a Mahabharata). This observation is basedon the fact that people at the grassroots have neither lost hope nor are they diffident. Their demand is for a meaningful share in ‘democracy’ (their own governance) and recognition of their culture and tradition. This cannot be achieved by simple grafting; the current exercise in decentralisation carries the same cultural baggage, which has so far arrested the growth of Panchayati Raj institutions and the dialogic modes of governance.

Most people today suffer from total absence of any government except that of private and state coercion. On the basis of field experiences and community responses recorded in parts of rural India, the suggestion is to incorporate guarantees for individual dignity, ethnic cultural survival, constitutional recognition of Indian tradition; (Jati, Sampradaya, Dharma and above all the vernacular wisdom, which is the natural mode of eco-specific survival) all of which was ruptured during the last three centuries as a consequence of colonisation.

There is an urgent need to establish Samvaad - the dialogic discourse or the practice to compulsorily legislate to distinguish nyaya from anyay and thereby establish order or dharma (rule of law) informed by a conscience and sensibility of fair play and socio-economic justice. Samvaad is the process of dealing with ambiguities within. This can be compared to the manner in which in Indian music, the musician compares the construct that he produces with that which exists in his consciousness as the ideal / beautiful. The musician continues to render and re-render the construct until he achieves the closest to the imagined.

The existing system has been unable to throw up competent leadership capable of resolving the crisis and eradicating anyay. Emergence of competent professional political, social, religious and cultural leadership is called for to create a dialogic form of government and curb ad-hocism in governance, i.e., organising governance by constant legislation, every-day law making and processes ensuring justice. Constitutional structures for vertical and horizontal dialogue, institutional openings for large-scale recruitment of personnel for governance and structural ladders to climb up in the political hierarchy are practically non-existent in the prevailing political system.

It is crucial to realise that most ills of the Indian political system emanate from two factors, viz. (i) shortage, rather fewness of official constitutional representatives, and (ii) non-professional character of politicians and social activists at all levels of society and nation-state.

Both ideology and functional institutions are now confined to caste and other ‘emotional’ or ‘cultural’ aspirations. Hence talent could neither be recruited nor groomed to flower into leadership. On the other hand, whatever leadership emerges remains apolitical and is criminalised as there is a need-based nexus amongst money, bureaucracy (police and civil administration), politics and crime.

Perhaps, politics was organised deliberately around casteism rather than around caste, dharma and community to boost nepotism and incompetence. But casteism and communal aspirations are now autonomous and seriously obstruct the processes of local and anchalik autonomy. Nonetheless, there is a genuine need to sublimate all these tendencies, urges and aspirations at village, district and anchalik levels of governance organisation. An understanding of the traditional institutional institutions of dharma, caste, sampradaya have to be evolved and constitutional forms need to be innovated to incorporate these sensibilities in statecraft.

Politics of social reconstruction and nyay could be easily wound up because party systems were fragile enough to be tamed and harnessed for personal ambition and vendetta by ‘supreme’ leaders like Indira Gandhi, Laloo Yadav, Mulayam Singh and Karunanidhi and their like or apex cabals as is possible in the Janata Dal, Bharatiya Janata Party or even the two main communist parties.

It will have to be admitted that an ideal community does not exist for quite for quite some time now or might have not existed before. Structural adjustments are needed to ensure equitable share and fairplay for opressed and toiling classes from the grass-roots to apex-roots governance. The prevailing electoral process have further aggravated tensions within the communities and contributed to fracturing the Indian community at the grassroots.

In a pluralistic caste based society, the electoral system needs to be carefully designed. An electoral exercise in which the first past the post is the winner and the defeated even by one, two or few votes, is vanquished, will contribute to divisiveness and malpractices that cannot be easily tamed by legal provisions. Hence, mechanisms are needed to transform the electoral process into unifying factor and ensure functional role for the dissent or minority view-point an absolute majority of votes polled, which is above 40% of the community, is likely to help forge larger social alliances among the people for electoral purposes. It is also not impossible to design functional accommodation for the dissident voice.

Party structures remained or became fragile because of the absence of constitutional structures which could compel sharing of power either vertically or horizontally (amongst the Union, provinces, anchals, districts and villages) or horizontally between the President and the Prime Minister, or even among the PM and his colleagues, the Chief Minister and his cabinet. Besides, there is a strong tendency for centralisation in the Westminster model, which is further aggravated by the colonial inheritance. With the continuation of the colonial bureaucratic model of essential administration, there could not be any formal or constitutional role for the party cadres. Their use is confined to organise mass meetings for senior leaders and function as election workers at the time of polls. The best of our leaders such as Morarji Desai, Pratap Singh Kairon, Kamaraj Nadar, Govind Ballabh Pant, Hanumantaiah, Babu Jagjivan Ram, Sukhadia, George Fernandes, H.N. Bahuguna etc. were / are excellent chief executives, but none could be said to posses or have possessed a comprehensive nyaya-drishti.

It was never realised that even though there are anecdotal resemblances with Thatcherism, most Indian Prime Ministers and Chief Ministers have been incapable of bold initiatives. Undoubtedly, Jawaharlal Nehru was a strong and grand leader, but a weak Prime Minister and an indecisive Chief Executive for a nation of India’s size. Indira Gandhi could do little to eradicate poverty, although it would be incorrect to suggest that she or her father was not genuine.

It is now obvious that most of these leaders could do little to stem the rising tide of corruption, inefficiency and the root of all evils - ad hocism. Widespread anyay is the consequence of ad-hocism. This also became the basis of sheltering crime and promoting nepotism at the cost of efficiency and honesty.

All this now constitutes a vicious circle. To break away from this unholy nexus and create space for appropriate politics, two basic mechanisms are needed:

Broadening the recruitment base for political workers, with a constitutional and formal role in day-to-day governance. The colonial bureaucratic model needs to be entirely replaced by a five-tie system [village, district, anchal, (cultural zone based on vernacular wisdom), province and the Union of India] of governance managed by representative elected directly, indirectly and on communitarian; and

Constitutional provision for horizontal and vertical accountability with autonomous ‘legislative’ empowerment of grass-root communities and intermediary or immediate levels institutionalised when there is no forum for easy and effective appeal.

A functional notion of collective wisdom will have to be incorporated in Indian politics by a system of referendum and mutual accountability extending upto all elected representatives of the people. A system of collegial plebiscite is possibly the only pragmatic approach to introduce an element of lokniti in rajniti.

A minimum reorganisation has to be so planned that the organisational wing of the party can share power with the parliamentary and the ministerial wing of the party in a legitimate manner, thereby ensuring effective implementation of party policies and programmes and effectively watching moral behaviour of representatives occupying positions of power. Sharing of power should not be based on whims and patronage or mere compulsions of sharing the spoils of office, but on constitutional mechanisms which need not be entirely formal. Conventions and customs are the staple of parliamentary governance.

The idea of alternate nations state and the absolutely minimum required government is based on the notion of four-pillar state with mutually inter-locking amongst the grass-roots, district, province and the Union and their anchoring to the vernacular cultural zones. The scheme must fortify the basic structure of the present constitution and reinforce the fundamental rights and directive principles enshrined in the book. All sections of society need to be assured of fair-play and healthy competition.

Simultaneously, the party system needs to be revived and restored without loss of time to break the nexus between crime and administration and wealth and politics. This can be achieved by enshrining regular constitutional role for the grass-root party cadres, i.e., linking membership and nomination for election to the Panchayats, Assemblies and Union Parliament with the existence of a specific percentage of booth committees funded by the State exchequer in direct proportion to the votes polled in various elections.

Compulsory and regular mass-contact by party cadres is the key to infuse lokniti in rajniti. To achieve this, as also to prevent the entry of non-political (particularly criminals and anti-social elements) directly to legislatures, the role and perpetual existence of partisan booth committees and constituency level committees would need to be constitutionalised functioning booth-committees alone can eliminate or limit the role of money and block the entry of undesirable elements to electoral politics. To continue as member of any legislature, periodical endorsement by the booth-committees will have to be mandatory. Otherwise the idea of ‘right to recall’ will remain a slogan. Besides legal role, grass-root cadres must also be provided respectable livelihood. The importance of politics must be emphasised at all levels of society.

Compulsory vertical federalism, in which the pyramid of power is reversed linked through the mechanism of anchalik councils enshrined as Lokpals / Lok-ayukta / Vogo;amce Commissioner and the highest court of appeal in all criminal and civil disputes amongst citizens themselves ad citizen and state upto district level, need to be introduced.

To constitutionalise an activist President, the electoral college of the President be extended upto all elected representatives of the people. To formalise federalism, provincial governors be elected on a similar basis within the province. Transparency in the administration can be introduced by compulsory liaison between the head(s) of state and their voters. It has to be appreciated that ‘every citizen’s right is nobody’s business’. In a general context, the citizen’s right to information can thus be formalised and effectively pragmatised.

It appears that since the Mughal times, the lynch-pin of effective authority and the crux of political and civil administration has been the district government. The colonial Raj transformed Ziladaar of Mughal times into Collector and District Magistrate. This office has to be incarnated as Zila Adhyaksha or Janpad Pramukh and directly elected by the people themselves. This is an absolute minimum step to emerge out of the mores of colonialism and establish some minimum good government. A critically decisive step in this proposal therefore is the abolition of the twin or join institutions of Collector and Kotwal and transfer all power at that level to an elected Zila-Nixaamat. There is an immediate need to save people from collector’s criminal government (kuraj) and provide them with the minimum needed order (suraj).

All this may appear a far cry from Gandhian prescription of Swaraj. It is important to not that Gandhian Swaraj cannot be achieved in one go. Attempts at quantum leap in social order have generally ended in disaster. Utopias are essential as lodestars - one can only move in that direction, but may never reach them. It is hoped that a small step towards restoration of vernacular wisdom, structured transparency and a commonly shared conscience can lead towards some minimum swaraj in due course.

There is, as well no 1800 return on all that has happened in the last 250 years. The central issue is to correct as many wrongs as possible. Possibly, an exercise in continuity with both the recent past and the not too recent past is needed.

Human liberation, at least in India, is in continuity and not in yet another rupture. Assurance of continuity is also essential for reconstituting the Samvaad is in continuity and not in rupture. A continuity with the pre-colonial past appears to be absolutely essential to sort out an ‘Indian modernity’.

Characteristics of Power

Any analysis of governance and politics is banal without categorising the basic characteristics of power.

1. Whatever the form of government - feudal, imperial, colonial, autocratic, democratic or fascist, power must be seen (visualised by those on whom it is exercised) as exercised for the good of the people. Governments must be seen as functioning, taking decisions, imparting justice, going places and doing things, and above all by acting in a responsive manner.

2. In any system, power cannot become functional without delegation of authority, i.e. sharing. Directly exercised power is limited, both in time and space. Power can be expanded only by delegation and sharing. It shrinks without sharing. There is choice with whom you may share it-bureaucrats, party cadres, apolitical individuals or anti-social elements. But you can never possess it without sharing.

3. Wealth, women, wine and whim (raw authority) naturally accrue around power as fringe benefits. Anyone in power must not pursue them. These cannot be the objectives of power. Enjoyment of power is expressed by patronage of good and excellence and rejection of evil and inferior. Power is the means to tame the bully and corrupt, and empower the weak, the oppressed and the honest.

4. Power or Governments should not be ephemeral. People are wary of instability. There is a Chinese proverb - ‘Let your children be not born during transition’. Power must appear to be stable and self-perpetuating by disseminating governance and promoting peace and harmony, nyay and dharma.

4.5. How do Categories and Literal Significance of Science, Law and Nature exploit the Earth

Western social structures of the authority of science and scientific education determine universally how environment shall be observed and treated by anyone who wants to eat and live in the prevailing modern world. Thus the degree of one’s literacy realizes his/her universal right to food in modern world (not in various other worlds) so that one’s illiteracy correlates to her/his hunger universally in modern world and not in various other worlds and environments.

“The modern universal was mediated by colonial conquest” and “the nation-state… has come to be recognized as the legitimate mediation between the individual and universal”, “to measure and tame the world” by the structures of control of nature and society and their “implicit co-linearity of subjucation and universal progress”. (Suresh Sharma; “Tribal Identity and the Modern World” Tokyo, 1994, pages 34, 55 and 66)

Intentions, which are formed in communication into common subjects for a community and law are thus decisive and “the effective reach of the modern colonial state” structures makes “choices available to communities... rigoriously foreclosed”. (Suresh Sharma; “Tribal Identity and the Modern World” Tokyo, 1994, pages 196-197.)

Forming intentions into common subjects for official, - national -, languages of literal universal significance of intentions under law, governance and common decisions, demands translatability of significance to those western senses, which are literal in most scientifically demonstrable way.

This is the common basis of ‘consolidation of nation-state’ and science of Nature in which the official literal significance of intentions is decisive as the power of western modern control compliant to the colonial heritage which have constituted this global power to subject intentions.

This constitutes nation - state as illusion of universal - illusion of right of intentions :

Modern law or decision requires a common subject or intention subjected to collect common predication onto itself to get determined on a judgement as realization of law and as sentence (compliant to western grammar); as the basis for literal significance of intentions of official language and law of any nation.

People’s community as nations in commonly understandable treatment of matters and decisions on them, differs from tribal community of what is decisive in equal sharing and deciding of matters. Tribe can be understood as community based on such “ethnographic heritage from Neolithic times”, which is organized by kinship or segmentary system of non-state social entities and societies, which represent a particular kind of “way of life” of community (B.K. Roy Burman; Aboriginal cultures and modern society, 2004).

Tribal modes of how human beings constitute ‘a people’ and what is decisive and equal in life and community, differ from that, what is decisive for a nation and nation states.

The prevailing structures of modern nation state and its ‘democracy’, which have developed under the heritage of colonialism, are developed to serve European nation-related intentions, European democracy and governance and do not provide equality for pre-colonized or tribal forms of community. In a sense “in Africa,… the state has always been fighting against the people” and formal modern democracy has often not changed the situation. (professor Sati from Tanzania in Mumbai seminar on Helsinki Process,18.1.2004). (The ‘liberalization’ of global slave trade has started the global governance and the global spread of western structures of governing of communities as ‘democracy’.)

Community of justice is conditioned by people’s culture of their ethical self-rule in founding a unity of commonly recognizable legitimacy in their common life and dignified identity as people. But European ‘civilization’ consists of ‘civis’ as judging of subjects on public civil life matters to make intentions ‘proper’ as literally demonstrable in common.

The universal as literal, globalizable civilized logical significance means, that:

What is perceptible for majority’s less literate intentions, is disqualified from what is decisive as recognizable ‘proper’ sense. Rights, dignity and income are determined by one’s degree of literacy and educated ‘Western civilization’.

One’s level of literacy is powered as modern civilization to found discriminative inequality of people’s rights to food, income, health, safety, governance, etc.. People’s rights - their laws, their income, their nutrition and health care - are highly determined by the literacy rate of an area or nation where they happen to get born.

The way how the power of “modern unification” “has forcibly linked the world together” (by “grid of natural resources… as reconstituted in terms of universal”), has thus not advanced global community of civil life in identification and treatment of things to become understandable and decidable in common and equal way.

Most of world’s countless less literate and less commercially ‘proper’ cultures and people are conquered under the modern universal on literal translatable understandability (in which “segmentation and re-linking for everyone on everything can be made potentially accessible for all”), as follows :

“Most of those who could understand an unwritten language, could not read, and those, who could read it could not understand it properly” (as being educated to readability of other languages). (Suresh Sharma in WSF-seminar “Gandhi in Our Times” in 18.1. 2004).

Here is no universality of access into what is right or proper literal sense as decisive common significance (in what is intended).

Can ‘communication’ form an equal community of common understanding, intentions and positions for decisions among those whose language and intentions are not effectively translatable or communicative for the western structures of semantics and grammar ?

The modern governance continues in the colonial manner to consume the indigenously inherited significance of land, life and intentions by subordinating and criminalizing their indigenous heritage into undermined translated significance.

‘Western universality’ of right as proper for senses, which sense it according to that, how literal the significance of intentions is, dis-criminates all sensed into ‘real’ literal (‘civilized’) intentions of ‘things’ from what is interrogated to be sentenced. (To pay or indemnify from all what is used for intentions with less literal significance).

But are literal sense and its scientific exactitudes and clarities really able to consider adequately and equally the perceptibility of boundless non-literal senses of the ambient life ?

And are ‘ambiguities’ of illiterate senses of ambient life necessarily some lack, ignorance, backward, self-defeating or less ‘to the point’ understanding or are they even more widely targeted (than literal senses) to what is concerned ?

All cultures of the world can not be equally ‘represented’ by governance or modern structures and powers of official ‘communication’ of decisive literal significance, which are not culturally wide enough as a form of the exchange of the intentions between cultures.

Literal significance on treated intentions, matters and their enforcement is rule of the western power and do not constitute any universality of access into what is right or proper sense (in intentions).

“Is it not a painful thing that, if I want to go to the court of justice, I must employ the English language as a medium… and that someone else should translate to me from my own language? Is this not absolutely absurd ? Is it not a sign of slavery”? “Knowledge of letters” of latin alfabet is a thing by which “more harm has been done… than good”. “By receiving English education we have enslaved the nation”. To throw away the English, but to keep their structure of law and governance means “English rule without the Englishman”.(Gandhi, “Hind Swaraj”, Ahmedabad 2001, pages 26, 76 and 78-79).

The official literal significance of intentions is decisive as the power of western modern control compliant to the colonial heritage, which constitutes this global power to subject intentions for nation - state as illusion of universal - as right of intentions :

The western scientifically literal significance of intentions of official language and law, is treated as right and proper in modern western control in a kind of juridical sense:

This ‘western universality’ of right as proper for senses which sense it according to that how literal the significance of intentions is, dis-criminates all sensed into ‘real’ literal (‘civilized’) intentions of ‘things’ from what becomes sentenced to indemnify all what is used for less literal intentions.

‘Civilization’ has tortured indigenous life by “aberrations brought about by colonial imposition of Anglo-Saxon Juristic system (basically derived from Roman Jurisprudence)” so that in some tribal areas “hardly one percent of land under traditional occupation of the tribal peoples from time immemorial was recorded” to be theirs. There has been “growing vulnerability of their ancestral domain as a result of state intervention in various forms in the name of development, elitist environmentalism and so on”. (B.K. Roy Burman, 19.2.2004)

“Most important source of displacement is the intrusion almost all over the country of the juristic concept of ‘res nullius’ by the colonial rulers (that which have not been assigned by the sovereign belongs to the sovereign)”. (B.K. Roy Burman; Observations, February 2004.)

The “international law remains primarily concerned with the rights… of European and similarly “civilized” States”, having for centuries presupposed “that indigenous lands are legally unoccupied… and can therefore become the property of the colonizing power through effective occupation.” Mostly by this kind of “rationalization and military… colonizers secured “ themselves to ‘own’ ”lands, territories and resources of indigenous peoples” as forms of “discovery”. (UN-report Indigenous peoples and their relationship to land, paragraphs 28, 29 and 31).

This colonial occupation of indigenous land under the rule and use of ‘civilized’ literal senses is in accordance to that how the etymology of the categories of western grammar and cognitive projections is connected to proceedings in Roman or colonial court and judiciary.

(Consider for example the juridical etymology of ‘judgement’ or ‘sentence’; or of ‘real’ as ‘res’, being a matter of a legal case; ‘subject’ as an intentional actor subordinated into literally thematized determinability under the law and thus as civilized citizen. ‘Predicate’ and ‘categorein’ are also implying juridical process for demonstrating possible guiltiness, ‘interrogation’ implies inquiry in this process; ‘discrimination’ means a separation of what is proper from what is not clarifying itself from interrogation. ‘Ex-sistent’ means what is challenged into a court; a ‘thing’ signifies a common gathered consideration of what is right, etc.)

Intentions are sentenced to give up their non-literal sense and to become transferred into ‘right‘ sense as what is perceivably proper for western literal, ‘civilized’ and more scientific senses.

In modernity “categories are used to organise the sensibility” by significance structures of “unity, reality, substantiality, causality, etc.” “Humans structuring their world” by their culture of “meaning generating... attempt” on “pre-social” conviviality, are creating space for communicative life, which is restricted in modernity by verifiability “reducible to quantifiable treatment”. “At the heart of modernity is the… rationality which considers scientific disciplines in their current form to be the only legitimate mode of acquiring knowledge” by a specific “method of doubt” for examination and demonstration. (Aboriginal cultures and modern Society, 2004)

In their categorization under the literal significance, the intentions are interrogated as becoming into question (or in-quisitioned) for becoming judged; sentenced into what is right as proper for being consumable by literal senses.

In modernity the cultures and the environment become measured and valued by “all encompassing process of re-demarcation of definitive boundaries in space and as cognitive categories” (Suresh Sharma; “Tribal Identity and the Modern World” Tokyo, 1994, page 36)

“Categories and perceptions are bound by a relationship” which “inevitably, conditions and forecloses what lies within reach, as also that which is reached and recognized”.

“Constituted by categories in terms of which facts are sought and investigated”, “recognition of social facts takes place in relation to some structure of historical reference”. (Suresh Sharma; “Tribal Identity and the Modern World”, pages 72-73).

When Aristotle gave the table of categories and noted that all we may search is ‘if something is’, ‘what’ it is or how or ‘why’ it is, was this a compulsory order for history,… or may be even for all cultures, past and futures of the world ?

Compulsory also for those who do not happen to have in their languages equivalents for interrogative pronouns like “what”, “why”, “that” or “how”, which direct all predication as designation of all subjects?

Under the prevailing modern categories and interrogatives, everything is perceived to be that it is what it is how it is why it is; the direction of its identity to happen in fact; the standing reserve for enframing of its own appropriation to be what it is ‘in fact’ only.

Constituting a “referent upon which all categories of description and judgement were sought to be predicated” “to measure and tame the world around” as Nature, “the modern universal was mediated by colonial conquest” and “consolidation of nation-state” by “ability of social facts to cohere into” “sweep of a universal epistemic space” for “boundaties of... property and... control “. “Every detail of… life and consciousness is seen to be truly itself to the extent that it helps… the… transformation” into “some variety of likeness to the dynamic substance of Europe” by interrogation and categorical predication. (Suresh Sharma; “Tribal Identity and the Modern World”, pages 34-35, 55, 58-61 and 66-67)

Intentions are ‘subjected’ by ‘predication’ to become ‘sentenced’ into what is ‘proper’ for western senses according to formal logic of perceivable significance as constitutive for all what gets ‘demonstrated’ as right in the share of the global gain by literacy of intentions:

In the modern world people’s rights - their laws, their income, their nutrition and health care - are highly determined by the literacy rate of an area or nation where they happen to get born.

Under the western literal structure of laws of state, nature, and ‘real things’ proper, intentions are sentenced to give up their non-literal sense and to become transferred into ‘right‘ sense as what is perceivably proper for western literal, ‘civilized’ and more scientific senses.

One’s innate privileges of the availability of western education of literal intentions determine thus now the resources available for the realisation of one’s universal human rights. This follows the ideology of the universal cultural neutrality of science, technology and modern western consumer standards as that what is literally proper to sense-realization, for example by exchangeable and consumable values for meanings.

The people of ancient rural India “held sovereigns of the earth to be inferior to the Rishis”. “Kings and their swords were inferior to the swords of ethics” and “courts, lawyers and doctors… were all within bounds”.

“The real meaning of the statement that we are a law-abiding nation is that we are passive resisters” who “do not submit to the laws” that are unjust. To live in justice is higher constitution for legitimacy than orders of courts, lawyers or other worldly rulers. For the people of ancient rural India, “the ordinary rule was to avoid courts… And where this cursed modern civilization has not reached, India remains as it was before”. “With a constitution like this”, the justice of people’s life is an example to be followed. (Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, Ahmedabad 2001, p. 26, 53-54 and 69-70).

In Indian heritage “identity of tribe was an identity rooted in resistance” and “linked to homeland” whose “communities have rights over all resources” (speakers in a WSF-debates on indigenous identity and survival on 20.1.2004, Mumbai).

Justice is not constituted by forcing people to follow in their land unjust laws against their will or land’s own culture of justice. “As against the legal doctrine of res nullius the doctrine which informed jurisprudence in precolonial India, was lex loci rie sitae (the system by which the people establish their relation with land is the source of law”. (B.K. Roy Burman; Tribal Peoples of India - Emerging Heritage, 2000)

As the legal power of specific law ends when all people stop following that law, the way how people live in justice by not following unjust laws, continuously re-constitutes the legitimacy of the legal order of people’s life.

Rights of people to advance the justice in which they live, is the source of the legitimacy of the power of law and the power given for the decision-makers to direct and initiate legislation as determined by the people. Our equality in leading our life resists any other use of power. This is constitutive for justice.

The task is thus not only to consider that the other world is possible, but to live already in a different world by constitution of justice where the life of people is freed from being enslaved by structures of global commerce and western nation states. (As was reminded in a World Social Forum seminar on Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj in Mumbai 18.1.2004)

The power of law continues thus to be constantly re-constituted by such order of life, which people follow as justice in their life by those means of subsistence, which maintain that life.

Above the changing prevailing governing powers, people’s rights to advance justice by cancelling the previous legal order, has always constituted the basis for the authority of the more actual legal order to prevail. (Results of peoples’ freedom struggle in many earlier colonies or results of the French revolution may be now respected as more democratic and free than feudal discrimination or slavery of colonization.)

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