Re-Learning Republic
Carol Andrade
From the time the Indian National Congress was formed in 1885, it was a wearying journey of 62 years to Independence Day. For many of us, the story seems to have ended there, a nation at liberty gradually becoming a country of libertines. The far more important journey to becoming a Republic took only two years and five months, to January 26, 1950, but this comparatively shorter distance gave India its self-image, its identity and a road-map to the future. Independence Day may have given us freedom, but Republic Day gave that freedom shape, enunciated our rights and our duties, put the onus, the moral responsibility for nurturing our hard-won freedom, on each one of us.
Yet, our understanding of Republic Day is at best fuzzy, at worst uncomprehending. It is as if the significance of our achievement has lain slumbering for many decades, once the initial flush of success following the freedom struggle died down. As we fought what was the good fight, to enter the comity of modern nations, our focus gradually narrowed to roti, kapda aur makaan. Our rights became secondary to the fight for sheer survival, through eons of industrial development, rationing, the rise of a dreadful greed among our politicians and our own painful acknowledgement of a second-rate nation ruled by men of an increasingly pygmy stature that we ourselves put into place, election after election.
Thank God liberalisation broke the back of this spell that seemed to hold us in thrall. Over the past two decades, as we have grown gradually aware of and knowledgeable about our rights, we have had to admit that duties keep pace, both given to us as the greatest gift of all by January 26, 1950. The gift of the Constitution is the immeasurable treasure of parliamentary democracy, in which we ourselves choose our rulers, making a truism of “by the people, for the people, of the people”.
America’s Theodore Roosevelt in 1910, speaking on “individual citizenship” said, “A democratic republic such as each of ours—an effort to realise in its full sense government by, of, and for the people—represents the most gigantic of all possible social experiments, the one fraught with greatest possibilities alike for good and for evil.“ The quality of the individual was supreme. In any other form of government, whether one man or a few, it was the quality of leaders that mattered for the nation to march into a “brilliant future”. It is only in a Republic that the success or failure of the average citizen is called into account, he said, where we must do our duty as good citizens in our day-to-day lives and occasionally rise to heroics when a crisis commands. The average citizen must be a good citizen if our republics are to succeed.
The need to realise that the onus for good governance is upon us is now imperative. We are not part of a benevolent dictatorship that can sit by the sidelines and accept the largesse handed out, though it often feels we are under a malevolent yoke of corruption, venality and greed. We are a parliamentary republic, and we are responsible for the state of the country today, one of the largest economies in the world with a dreadful track record of hunger, malnutrition and denial of fundamental rights for large swathes of the population.
What does this mean for Christians in India? More than ever, using our twin advantages of education and a reputation for honesty, we must start participating in the process, through voting, making informed choices, understanding one’s rights, learning how to use RTI, helping those who do not, and certainly standing for elections. Christians in India are a true microcosm of the country, represented in every state, part of most of the mainstream linguistic communities.
It is time they started talking the language of politics as well.
