Jawaharlal Nehru was the first and
foremost Prime Minister of India. He brought brave new Bharat
international stature and pre-eminence in the non-aligned movement. He
and the Indian National Congress of which he was president, stood for
swaraj, swadeshi, and a socialistic pattern of society. The Planning
Commission was set up with the creative-dynamic objective of shaping a
revolutionary transformation with an egalitarian vision and strategy.
Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, with a humanist drive and socialist
vision, gave more economic teeth and political pragmatism to the
progressive social justice pledge. She abolished the privy purses of
the profusion of princes, nationalised leading private banks and other
key enterprises and, most important, amended the Constitution to
declare the Republic to be socialist, secular and democratic.
Those who dismiss, denigrate or disregard the socialist element, with
its egalitarian and agrarian focus, betray Gandhi, Nehru and Indira.
Those who treat the key promises in the Preamble to the Constitution —
which is a fundamental factor in the basic structure of the polity —
with cynical contempt, with feelings of dollar domination, rupee
devaluation, and the submissive illusion that our world is beholding a
decadence of socialism and an escalation of White House supremacy and
occupation by multinational corporations, are guilty of the same kind
of betrayal. The Congress has jettisoned its swaraj and soul, and
serendipitously found inspiration in U.S. Inc. Having assumed office by
taking an oath of allegiance to the socialist, secular, democratic
Constitution, anyone who commits colonially conditioned violation of
these values cannot honestly continue in offices of state power. How
can they observe November 14 in the name of Nehru unless they proclaim
with statesmanly integrity that they stand by the Preamble which is
paramount and adhere to the socialistic dimension of government
inscribed therein?
The Left, which runs a few State governments and supports the Union
government and ensures its survival, must not submit to the hidden
agenda of neo-capitalist rule, with dependencia syndrome, if any moral
principles govern their ideology and politics. Exotic pressures,
swadeshi-allergic imports and luxury investments using the
trans-Atlantic mantra of globalisation, liberalisation and
privatisation represent a dubiously democratic elite mafiacracy.
Socialism, under the present establishment, is suffering a Seppuku
pathology. “The purpose of development should not be to develop things
but to develop man.” (The Cocoyoc Declaration, 1974). If distorted it
is a disastrous slogan, with land-grab freebooters robbing the poor
into homeless slavery and the rich lawlessly exhibiting class
‘affluenza’. We have two Bharats, one ruling the other with the aid of
state power.
Such is the horror: contemporary anti-socialist, para-colonial society
coalition administrations which boast of ersatz per capita income are
blinking at the slums and the petty peasantry. This is silent
terrorism, tacit debunking of humanism. This grave situation is
defended de facto by a strange Left stance which formally opposes a
pro-U.S. nuclear deal but actually sustains the same Cabinet by
ensuring its continuance — which amounts to a riddle wrapped in a
mystery. What an inconvenient truth. This is the fate of our
socialistic Constitution.
U.S. nuclear big business is lobbying to make India a quasi-colony —
which is an inconvenient truth that our sovereign executive hides. Why
be a nuclear mendicant before the unipolar mega-power? Nehru, Indira or
Morarji would never have succumbed to this imperial deal. We have,
beyond doubt, wind power, solar power, hydro-power, earth heat power,
wave power — if only we have the will to use globally available
technology. But do we have the do-or-die spirit of swaraj?
Now comes another mega-mendacious observance. November 14, we are told
by the Central government, is Children’s Day. But in reality those who
run the Republic have scant regard for the Indian child, the
celebration of Nehru’s birthday notwithstanding. Gabriela Mistral, a
Nobel prize winner, wrote: “We are guilty of many errors and many
faults, but our worst crime is abandoning the children, neglecting the
fountain of life. Many of the things we need can wait, the child
cannot. To him we cannot answer tomorrow. His name is today.”
Read Maria Montessori: “Humanity shows itself in all its intellectual
splendour during this tender age as the sun shows itself at the dawn,
and the flower in the first unfolding, of the petals; and we must
respect religiously, reverently, these first indications of
individuality.”
To rob a generation of tender wonders of the right to rise to their
mental, moral height, to unfold their flowering of faculties and to
crib their personality, is societal criminality and culpable
desertification of fertile human resources.
The Supreme Court, in M.C. Mehta v. State of Tamil Nadu, dwelt upon the
obligation of state and society towards the children of India.
Here comes the poignant pertinence of the noble U.N. Convention on the
Rights of the Child. In Mehta, the court recalled the commitment that
India made to the world community by acceding to the Convention on the
Rights of the Child (1989). The Convention covers the full personality
of the child in every dimension. Acceding to the instrument represented
a reinforcement of the tryst of the Republic with the children of India
which has to be redeemed. The girl child faces everything from
foeticide to ‘sati-cide’ to ‘dowry-cide’ to ‘rapicide’.
India has come under international censure, more so because even poorer
African countries have done better by children than the Socialist
Republic of India where the little child is still made to work on
crackers and carpets. Every match box or cracker, every bangle, every
brass-ware piece, every hand-made carpet or polished precious stone has
on it a streak of innocent blood and the tormented tears of some child
forced to slave.
The Central government has not made any comprehensive legislation to
implement the U.N. Convention and save the juvenile victim. This tragic
indifference induced UNICEF to set up a committee of which this writer
was the Chairman, and many distinguished persons including Margaret
Alva and Justice A.M. Ahmadi were members, to consider how best to give
effect to the Convention on the Rights of the Child. We drafted a
regular Bill doing justice to the Convention and presented it to Prime
Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. He praised the draft and agreed to bring
it before Parliament. His term expired and the Congress came to power.
Years have passed since, many a Children’s Day has passed, and now
another November 14 has come.
The Union Government has aggravated the number of street children,
allowed the escalation of child illiteracy by making lower kindergarten
and upper kindergarten so expensive as to keep poor children out, and
blinked culpably at the growing sexual abuse of juveniles.
A code for child rights is overdue. The tragedy of India is that there
is no more Nehru, no more child rights, no more constitutional duty to
enact a “paedo-code” to go by the U.N. Convention of which India is a
signatory.
http://www.hindu.com/2007/11/14/stories/2007111453071100.htm
Copyright © 2007, The Hindu.
