National Integration and Constitutional

NATIONAL INTEGRATION AND
CONSTITUTIONAL ABBERATIONS

Lecturer in Economics, Narsapur College, Narsapur

Immediately after Independence, the physical integration of India was accomplished with lightning speed. Sardar Patel, the great architect of the Indian nation, lost no time, and left no stone un turned, in bringing about the merger of the five hundred and odd Princely States with the Indian Union. But the task of emotional integration, notwithstanding the fait accompli of physical integration, is still unfulfilled, and remains as elusive as ever before. There has been protracted delay and hesitation in taking the necessary steps for achieving our most cherished but none the less most neglected objective of emotional integration. The policy of our Government is tending to endanger even the nation's physical integration, and to undo the great work of our Sardar.

The present situation has arisen because of certain special provisions which made leeway into our Constitution, by which it was sought to confer special status and preferred treatment to selected regions and communities within the country. These special provisions were dictated by political inexperience and short-sightedness. They do not reflect the overall interests of the nation. But our Government did nothing, in the last eighteen years since Independence, to remove this constitutional cob-web of special clauses.

Take the case of Kashmir. The. State became an integral part of the Indian Union, under a covenant of accession, executed by its ruler, in accordance with the Indian Independence Act of 1947. But, strange as it looks, our Constitution contains special provisions which confer a special status on this region. In a federation, such as ours, no State or region is entitled to a more equal status. Our Constitution cannot possibly discriminate between the people living in Kashmir and the rest of India. Such constitutional aberrations are ethically inequitous and politically unsound.

If a special status is given to one region, it is certain to lead to similar demands from other regions in the country. One such constitutional deviation is enough to set in motion a process of national disintegration which cannot be halted. To allow and to make room for such a special status by constitutional provision, the Indian Union is not a confederation of loosely knit sovereign states which may tear off their connections from the main body politic any day, choosing their own convenience and acting independently at their will and pleasure. Ours is a federal set-up, and its essentials ought to be preserved. It is therefore imperative that our Union Government does away, as expeditiously as possible, with all sorts of special status provisions of our Constitution, as a first step towards national integration. The minimum that could be done to help serve the cause of national integration is to bestow equal constitutional status on all Indians. Any claims to special status and privileges by regional or communal groups offends against the fraternity of Indians, while concessions to this effect discriminate in favour of some against the others.

The logic of the case of Kashmir naturally led the Nagas to go a step further and to demand an independent status for Nagaland. Reports have it that our Government may be willing to concede some kind of special status to Nagaland. Once again, this is to become an utterly dangerous game. How far the Constitution of India is going to be amended to satisfy the separatist demands of regional or religious groups in the country is a matter agitating the minds of all patriotic Indians.

It is the politics of religion that has prompted the Nagaland demand for independent status. Already our Government has gone, too far in allowing itself to play into the hands of the Nagaland Baptist Church Mission. The main stay of this Church is but politics of religion. Our secular Government believes that religion is purely: a personal matter. But religious missions are unsecular in approach and outlook. Secularism is devoid of any appeal to them. They foster and propagate religious group loyalties. Heads of religion appropriate those loyalties to themselves and work up feelings of religious seclusion to strengthen their hold over their following. Such following is used to grind political ends. So with the spread or Christianity, the cry of a separate nationhood status mounted up in Nagaland. Our Constitution and the approach of the Union Government may be secular, but that of the Baptist Church Mission and its loyal followers is certainly not. Besides, what was the locus standi of a foreigner like Mr. Scott, for the Union Government to have allowed him to set foot on the soil of Nagaland and to meddle in a purely internal affair of ours? What, then, were the credentials of Mr. Scott? How could it be expected of him that he would make for impartial mediation, after it became known that he gave asylum to Phizo, the underground rebel? Little wonder, Mr. Scott now intends to internationalise the Nagaland issue. The present stalemate in our relations with the Nagas is the direct consequence of the pusillanimous policies of the Union Government. The terms ‘cease-fire’ and ‘peace’ are appropriate in describing a state of truce entered into between two sovereign states. They sound absurdly meaningless within the context of a universally known relationship between a Union and anyone of its constituents. The Nagas ought to be told that secession and treason are unlawful and will be dealt with as such. Any compliance with the demand for a special status formula will ultimately lead to the withering away of our federal Union.

Unfortunately, our Constitution is serving as a hornet’s nest of several kinds of special concessions. Girijans and Harijans were given preferred treatment. It was originally stipulated that this position was to last for a period of ten years. However, this time limit was later raised. It became clear once again, that once an exception is made and a privileged position is conceded to a region or a community, the tendency is to preserve isolation and aloofness to justify the continuance of the privileges. Vested interests gain momentum and strength with the passage of time. Those interests view with suspicion, and resist any attempt to remove the preferred treatment. Human nature, being what it is, will be unwilling to forego advantages to which one gets used by long preferment. The States’ list of ward-classes too has been steadily swelling year after year. It looks as though, more and more castes of people are becoming ‘ward’, with the passage of time after Independence. It is one thing to give help to the really economically ward and deserving cases. It is quite another to recognise and reward caste wardness, which encourages caste and sectarian outlook. The Constitution should not be made an instrument for distributing special favours and patronage to select communities by the party in power. The Government should conduct itself as a trustee of the nation’s future.

The act of assigning to Hindi, without any appreciable merit in it, a special status in our Constitution, is threatening to undermine the cause of the nation’s emotional integration. Hindi is not spoken even by one-fifth of the total population. Its usage is not wide-spread throughout the country, but confined to only a few north Indian States. The majority of Indians are not prepared to accept it as the official language of the Indian Union, for a good variety of reasons. The imposition of such a language against mounting opposition is bound to cause untold damage to national integration.

In making the choice of a language for official purposes on an all-India basis, the peculiar Indian conditions must be taken into account. In a multi-lingual society such as ours, where no one language can claim to have an all-India stature, the best course is to evolve a new language out of the fourteen national languages, using modernised simplified Sanskrit as the basis or cementing force. English may be allowed to continue during the transition period. It may remain thereafter, as an associate language and an international link language.

The present stalemate and confusion attendant on the choice of the official language should be removed right now. Hindi cannot be made the official language of the Indian Union without imposition from above. Democracy and force are contradictory terms. Moreover, the use of Hindi as official language confers special advantages to people in the Hindi-speaking States. And this constitutes an invidious discrimination against the vast majority of the non-Hindi-speaking people, which our Constitution should avoid. The emergence of a new official or national language which should take place under proper planning, would alone balance all conflicting interests and confer equal advantages and disadvantages on all and there can be no room for complaint, as there would be no need to provide for any constitutional elevated status to any one of the regional languages, now exclusively held by Hindi.