Loksabha 2024

THE NDA SUFFERED A DECISIVE LOSS IN PHASE 1 OF THE POLLING

The results of Lok Sabha 2024 elections show that of the 102 constituencies that were polled in the first phase on April 19, NDA has won only 34, while 68 seats have gone to others. Part of the reason for this low score for the NDA is that 40 of the 102 seats in the first phase were from Tamil Nadu and Puducherry, from where the NDA could expect to get little. But, unexpectedly, the NDA also lost 4 of the 5 seats in Maharashtra, 8 of the 12 seats in Rajasthan and 6 of the 8 seats in Uttar Pradesh. It also lost all of the 6 seats of Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Nagaland. In addition, it lost a seat each in Assam, Bihar and West Bengal.

This looks like a decisive loss in the very first phase of polling. The leadership must have been made aware of the scale of possible loss by their cadre, pollsters and the intelligence outfits. Could that be the reason for the very visible and audible shift in the style of campaigning in the later phases?

Incidentally, out of the 34 seats won by the NDA in this phase of polling, 30 went to the BJP and 4 to its allies. Of the 68 seats won by others, INC obtained 27. The two parties were thus running neck to neck in this phase.

MAHATMA GANDHI AND THE WORLD III

TOLSTOY EVEN KNEW ABOUT GANDHIJI'S “HINDU PATRIOTISM”

We began our previous blog on Tolstoy and Gandhiji with Troyat’s quote about how Tolstoy “deeply admired” Gandhiji “except for his Hindu patriotism, which spoils everything”. There is a background to this exception that tempered Tolstoy’s admiration. 

 

In his Letter to a Hindoo, Tolstoy had expressed his great appreciation for the ways of the Hindus, but he had some reservation about some of their beliefs. Towards the conclusion of this Letter, he advised the Hindus to shun these beliefs, writing:

 

If only people freed themselves from their beliefs in all kinds of Ormuzds, Brahmas, Sabbaoths, and their incarnation as Krishnas and Christs, from beliefs in Paradises and Hells, in reincarnations and resurrections, from belief in the interference of the Gods in the external affairs of the universe, and above all, if they freed themselves from belief in the infallibility of all the various Vedas, Bibles, Gospels, Tripitakas, Korans, and the like, and also freed themselves from blind belief in a variety of scientific teachings about infinitely small atoms and molecules and in all the infinitely great and infinitely remote worlds, their movements and origin, as well as from faith in the infallibility of the scientific law to which humanity is at present subjected: the historic law, the economic laws, the law of struggle and survival, and so on… —the simple law of love, natural to man, accessible to all and solving all questions and perplexities, would of itself become clear and obligatory.  

 

Gandhiji, while translating the Letter did not quite appreciate this advice, especially the advice to the Hindus to give up belief in reincarnation and rebirth. In his letter to Tolstoy, seeking permission to publish the Gujarati translation of the Letter, he politely requested Tolstoy to remove the reference to reincarnation in this context:

 

I would also venture to make a suggestion. In the concluding paragraph you seem to dissuade the reader from a belief in reincarnation. I do not know whether …you have specially studied the question. Re-incarnation or transmigration is a cherished belief with millions in India, indeed, in China also. With many, one might almost say, it is a matter of experience, no longer a matter of academic acceptance. It explains reasonably the many mysteries of life. With some of the passive resisters who have gone through the gaols of the Transvaal, it has been their solace. My object in writing this is not to convince you of the truth of the doctrine, but to ask you if you will please remove the word “re-incarnation” from the other things you have dissuaded your reader from.

 

It was indeed impish for the young Gandhi to make such a request to the celebrated sage of Yasnaya Polyana. Tolstoy, it seems, was not amused by the impudence. Replying to Gandhiji, he wrote: “As to the word ‘reincarnation’, I should not myself like to omit it, for, in my opinion, belief in reincarnation can never be as firm as belief in the soul’s immortality and in God’s justice and love. You may, however, do as you like about omitting it.”

 

Gandhiji, in his Gujarati translation, removed both “reincarnation” and “resurrection” from this paragraph of Tolstoy’s Letter to a Hindoo.

 

Such was the deep faith that Gandhiji had already acquired in Hindu Dharma and its foundational principles. Later, in 1921, in an article published in the Young India of 6.10.1921, he proclaimed:

 

I call myself a sanatani Hindu, because,

1. I believe in the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Puranas and all that goes by the name of Hindu scriptures, and therefore in avataras and rebirth,

2. I believe in the varnashrama dharma in a sense in my opinion strictly Vedic but not in its present popular and crude sense,

3. I believe in the protection of the cow in its much larger sense than the popular,

4. I do not disbelieve in idol-worship.

 

Notice that the first of the essential attributes of Hinduism that he defines here is belief in rebirth and reincarnation. 

 

Gandhiji was the first and perhaps the only modern Hindu to proudly and unapologetically proclaim his faith in all of the foundational principles of Hinduism. Unlike many of our reformist leaders, he was not overwhelmed by neither the claims of universal rationality of the West, nor the claims to universal love and justice of Christianity. He refused to compromise on any of the principles of Hinduism on such grounds. He did not compromise on these even in the face of Tolstoy, the wise and saintly spokesperson of the western civilisation and Christian religion. This complete and unwavering faith in Indian civilisation and Hindu religion made the world pause and listen to him. Beyond his unconditional faith, he needed no other support to make an imprint on the world. 

 

Postscript: Gandhiji, it seems, was aware Tolstoy’s exasperation at his ‘Hindu Patriotism’. In March 1926, long after the death of Tolstoy, while writing to an unnamed correspondent about some ‘fundamental differences’ between him and Tolstoy, he wrote: … “My patriotism is patent enough; my love for India is ever growing but it is derived from my religion and is therefore in no sense exclusive."

This note is based on our book, "Making of a Hindu Patriot" and on an article on the Relevance of Mahatma Gandhi on our website.

MAHATMA GANDHI AND THE WORLD II

TOLSTOY IN HIS REMOTE LITERARY ABODE

 KNEW ABOUT GANDHIJI AND HIS WORK

Henry Troyat, the scholarly Russian-French author who wrote an authoritative biography of Tolstoy, records that in the months before his death in 1910, Tolstoy was corresponding “with Gandhi, whom he deeply admired, ‘except for his Hindu patriotism, which spoils everything’”.

Leo Tolstoy is considered one of the greatest and most influential authors of all times; within his lifetime, he had come to be regarded and celebrated as an author and philosopher of the west. Reports of Gandhiji’s Satyagraha in South Africa, the form of struggle against tyranny that he invented and led, must have reached far and wide already in 1910, for Tolstoy, who lived in his “inaccessible literary stronghold” of Yasnaya Polyana, to agree to correspond with the young man and even to come to admire him deeply.

The correspondence occurred in the context of the Letter to a Hindoo, which Tolstoy had written to response to a couple of letters from Tarak Nath Das, an Indian revolutionary in North America, seeking support for the Indian Independence movement. Gandhiji came across this letter during his visit to England in the latter half of 1909 and translated it into Gujarati in the course of his voyage back to South Africa. Before publishing the translation in his weekly paper, Indian Opinion, Gandhiji writes to Tolstoy requesting him to confirm the accuracy of the English translation that he had used and seeking his permission for publishing the Gujarati translation. This was the beginning of Gandhiji’s correspondence with Tolstoy. In his last letter to Gandhiji written in September 1910, a couple of months before his death in November 1910, Tolstoy writes:

“…your [Gandhiji’s] work in Transvaal, which seems to be far away from the centre of our world, is yet the most fundamental and the most important to us supplying the most weighty practical proof in which the world can now share and with which must participate not only the Christians but all the peoples of the world. …”

Gandhiji and his work were thus already known in 1910 to Tolstoy, in his remote abode. The fame had spread because of the crucial significance of his work for mankind, as Tolstoy hints. The Mahatma and his work continue to guide all people of the world suffering under the tyranny of unjust and arrogant rulers. No films or other exercises in public relations are required to propagate it.

[Gandhiji in his correspondence with Tolstoy displayed an impish insistence on the foundational principles of Hinduism, which seems to have led Tolstoy to temper his admiration with the proviso “except for his Hindoo Patriotism” that Troyat records. We shall write about this episode in a later blog. The correspondence between Gandhiji and Tolstoy is reproduced in our book Making of a Hindu Patriot.

https://cpsindia.org/publication/making-of-a-hindu-patriot/]

 

MAHATMA GANDHI AND THE WORLD I

THE FILM DID NOT MAKE HIM FAMOUS: 

HE MADE THE FILM FAMOUS

These strange times make me recall that Gandhiji's first biography was published from London in 1909. It was republished in India by G. A. Natesan of Madras in 1919. After Independence, the Publication Division reprinted Natesan's edition in 1967.

https://www.mkgandhi.org/ebks/mkg-Indian-patriot-in-south-africa.pdf

The author of this intense biography was Joseph Doke, an English baptist minister, who arrived in South Africa in 1903 and who, in December 1907, sought out Gandhiji, to meet and see the man who was then leading the Indians of South Africa in a Passive Resistance Movement. Joseph Doke describes his first meeting with Gandhiji in his Johannesburg office thus:

"It was late in December, 1907, when I saw Mr. Gandhi for the first time. Rumour had been very busy with his name. The Passive Resistance Movement had come into prominence. Some small stir had been made in the newspapers by the imprisonment of a Pundit, and in one way or another, Mr. Gandhi’s name had been bandied from lip to lip. One evening, a friend raised the Asiatic question at the supper-table, and as we were comparatively new to Johannesburg, although not new to the country, he told us what he thought of the Indians. His account was so strange and so completely opposed to all our previous experience that it made us curious, and more than anything else decided me to interview the leader."

Doke's friendship with Gandhiji and his knowledge of the man deepened when a year later, in December 1908, Doke and his wife took a nearly fatally wounded Gandhiji home and nursed him back to health. Doke describes the incident thus:

"Another scene recurs to my mind with equal vividness. The Pathans had attacked him, striking him down and beating him with savage brutality. When he recovered consciousness, he was lying in an office nearby to which he had been carried. I saw him a moment later. He was helpless and bleeding, the doctor was cleansing his wounds, the police officers watching and listening beside him, while he was using what little strength he had to insist that no action should be taken to punish his would-be murderers. “They thought they were doing right,” he said, “and I have no desire to prosecute them.” They were punished, but Mr. Gandhi took no part in it."

This first biography of Gandhiji carries a foreword by Lord Ampthill, a British peer and Governor of Madras from 1900-1906, who until then had only heard about the unusual movement of Gandhiji and not met him yet.

The biography is entitled, "M. K. Gandhi—An Indian Patriot in South Africa". In those days, everyone who met him seems to have been struck by his intense patriotism, his love, respect and devotion for his land, his people and his civilisation. It is this aspect of Gandhiji that we have tried to document in our book, "The Making of a Hindu Patriot". 

https://cpsindia.org/publication/making-of-a-hindu-patriot/

Attenborough's film indeed took Mahatma Gandhi to some new sections of the international elite. But it is not the film that made Gandhiji known to the world; if anything, he made the film known.

The Process of Abrogating Article 370

The Process of Abrogating Article 370

In scrapping Article 370 of the Constitution and reorganising the State of Jammu and Kashmir, the Government has adopted a meticulously crafted constitutional and legislative mechanism, the beauty of which may have escaped attention of most people in the tumultuous events of August 5/6, 2019. This article tries to describe and explain the mechanism adopted.

Background

To understand the mechanism of abrogation, it is necessary to have some understanding of the background in which this exercise was undertaken. Article 370 of the Constitution and the Constitutional Order issued in 1954 in implementation of that Article formed this background.

Article 370

Article 370 was a constitutional device to ensure that the Constitution of India and the laws made by the Parliament would not apply in their entirety to the State of Jammu and Kashmir. Clause (1) of Article 370 stated that: “(d) … provisions of this Constitution shall apply in relation to that State subject to such exceptions and modifications as the President may by order specify: Provided further that no such order … … shall be issued except with the concurrence of [the] Government [of the State].”

Clause (3) of Article 370 provided for the repeal or modification of this article, but only on the recommendation of the Constituent Assembly of that State.

The Constitution Order (CO 48) of 1954

In exercise of the powers conferred by Clause (1) of Article 370, the President of India issued The Constitution (Application to Jammu and Kashmir) Order, 1954, which laid down which parts of the Constitution, and with what exceptions and modifications, would be applicable to the State of Jammu and Kashmir. This Order never formed part of the Constitution of India, but was included as Appendix I. Later, several orders were passed amending the CO 48 of 1954 and specifying further exceptions and modifications in the application of the Constitution to the State of Jammu and Kashmir. All such exceptions and modifications were consolidated in Appendix II of the Constitution entitled, “Re-statement, with reference to the present text of the Constitution, of the exceptions and modifications subject to which the Constitution applies to the State of Jammu and Kashmir”.

The exceptions and modifications thus specified were extensive. Even the Preamble was modified to omit the words “socialist secular” in the first paragraph and the word “integrity” in the penultimate paragraph. The latter paragraph in its unmodified form read, “…assuring the dignity of the individual and the unity and integrity of the Nation”. It is difficult to imagine that there was indeed some Government of that State which took objection to asserting the “integrity of the nation” and even secularism of the polity, and that such an objection was entertained and accommodated by the Government at the Centre!

The spirit behind several exceptions and modifications made in the Constitution in pursuance of Article 370 was similarly difficult to comprehend. Many of the fundamental rights, which form part of the basic structure of the Constitution, were modified in their application to the State. Part IV comprising the Directive Principles of State Policy and Part IVA defining the Fundamental Duties were entirely omitted.

One of the most consequential modifications introduced through the Constitution Order of 1954 was the insertion of Article 35A. This Article, which had been the focus of much debate in the past, gave the State immunity to continue with and enact discriminatory laws defining “permanent residents” and “conferring on such permanent residents any special rights and privileges or imposing upon other persons any restrictions …” This in effect meant that the State of Jammu and Kashmir was under no obligation to protect the fundamental rights of the citizens of India other than those that the State chose to define as permanent residents.

Article 370, the Constitution Oder of 1954 issued under the authority of that Article, and several orders issued to amend it had thus created an elaborate constitutional framework for the State of Jammu and Kashmir which was in several respects in conflict with the spirit of the Constitution and was in some instances against the hallowed doctrine of the basic structure.

Mechanism of retraction

The mechanism that the Government adopted to unravel this complex and ungainly constitutional structure created specifically for the State of Jammu and Kashmir involved several steps.

Step 1: Making all of the Constitution applicable to the State

The first step the Government took was to get the President to issue

The Constitution (Application to Jammu and Kashmir) Order, 2019, superseding the Constitution Order of 1954 and making “All the provisions of the Constitution, as amended from time to time” applicable to the State of Jammu and Kashmir, with only a single exception/ modification, which we discuss later.

This order (CO 272) was issued under powers conferred by clause (1) of article 370 of the Constitution, by the President with the concurrence of the Government of State of Jammu and Kashmir. This is exactly the process through which the earlier order of 1954 was issued. Concurrence of the State in this case meant the concurrence of the Governor, since the State happened to be under the President’s rule.

The order, promulgated by the President on the morning of August 5, came “into force at once”. The Constitution of India, in its entirety, began to apply to the State of Jammu and Kashmir from that moment.

This in itself was enough to render Article 370 completely ineffectual, except that the Article could have been used in the future by another Government to issue an order similar to the Constitutional Order of 1954.

Step 2: Preparing for the abrogation of Article 370

The next step of actually abrogating Article 370 could be undertaken only under Clause (3). That required a recommendation from the Constituent Assembly of the State, which had ceased to exist long ago. The Constitution Order (CO 272) of 2019, therefore, modified the Constitution in its application to the State by adding Clause (4) to Article 367 (which deals with Interpretations) interpreting the term “Constituent Assembly” in Clause (3) of Article 370 to mean the legislative assembly of that State. Because the State was under the President’s rule, the powers of the legislative assembly at that point of time vested in the Parliament.

Step 3: Abrogation of Article 370

Having thus acquired the constitutional authority, the Government moved a statutory resolution asking the Parliament, acting as the legislature of the State, to recommend to the President the issuing of a public notification under Clause (3) of Article 370 read with Clause (1) declaring that all clauses of Article 370 would cease to operate except Clause (1) which would read as under: “All provisions of this Constitution, as amended from time to time, without any modifications or exceptions, shall apply to the State of Jammu and Kashmir notwithstanding anything contrary…”.

That resolution was adopted by the Rajya Sabha on August 5 and by the Lok Sabha on August 6. Acting on that recommendation, the President shall issue the notification abrogating all Clauses of Article 370 except Clause (1), which would thus incorporate into the Constitution the formulation of the Constitutional Order 2019, issued on the morning of August 5, that formed the foundation of the whole exercise.

With that public notification by the President, the Constitution shall no more have any Appendices that were part of the Constitution and yet not integrated within the body of the Constitution. The Constitution and the country shall thus both recover their wholeness.

Step 4: Acquiring the authority to reorganise the State

With the coming into force of the Constitution Order of 2019, and consequently all provisions of the Constitution becoming applicable to the State, the Parliament got the authority to reorganise the State, as it would any other State of India. Under the earlier Constitution Order of 1954, the Parliament could have undertaken this exercise only with the consent of the legislature of that State. Now, the reorganisation bill had to be merely sent to the legislature of that State for its view.

The Government, therefore, drafted the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Bill, 2019 dividing the State into the Union Territory of Ladakh and the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir. Since the powers of the legislature of the State at that time vested in the Parliament, the President referred the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Bill, 2019 to the Parliament for its view.

The Government, thereafter, moved another statutory resolution asking the Parliament “to express the view to accept” the reorgnisation bill. This resolution was introduced in both houses on August 5 and was adopted on the same day.

Step 5: Passage of the Reorganisation Bill

The next step was for the Parliament to consider and pass the Reorganisation Bill. The Bill was passed by the Rajya Sabha on August 5 and by the Lok Sabha on August 6. This completed the process.

A beautifully structured step-by-step process

This elaborate and meticulously structured step-by-step exercise to abrogate Article 370 and reorganise the State of Jammu and Kashmir into two Union Territories almost had the beauty of a structured mathematical proof. As in any complex mathematical proof, every step in this exercise had been previously applied and tested in some context. None of the individual steps was a constitutional innovation, but put together these led to an innovative result.

It was this careful and rigorous structuring of the process of repeal and reorganisation which gave the Home Minister the confidence to forcefully declare in the Rajya Sabha on August 5 that the legislative and constitutional mechanism being adopted would pass the judicial scrutiny that would surely follow.

Incidentally, all these statutory resolutions and legislative measures were passed in each house by considerably more than 2/3rd of the members present and voting.

The Government deserves complements not only for its great political will in undertaking this historical exercise of reintegrating the Constitution and the country, but also for the legislative and constitutional skill and commitment displayed by it in executing its will.

Dr. J. K. Bajaj

Centre for Policy Studies

August 06, 2019