A New Idea of India: Individual Rights in a Civilisational State

by Harsh Gupta 'Madhusudan'

Competitive intolerance occurs when opportunistic governments choose what to censor based on their political preferences.

‘I contend that there is no such thing as an absolute right vested in any individual or in any community forming part of a nation; that all rights are relative, that no society can remain intact even for twenty-four hours on the basis of absolute rights,’ he wrote. He believed that ‘All the rights of an individual are subject to the equal rights of others, which in fact creates duties and obligations on the part of the different members of a society towards each other.’

Lofty idealism is often the graveyard of common sense. That is why, for any idealism to fructify, it must remain rooted in reality.

citizens rely on the ability of the government to use force on their behalf as necessary to protect them from violence. Individual freedom implies individual responsibility and those who initiate violence must be held responsible for their actions—not those who offended them. We must never forget American statesman Benjamin Franklin’s warning, ‘Those who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety’.

To paraphrase the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, socialists do not believe in ‘negative liberty’ or freedom from the State beyond the protection of life, liberty and property, but instead in ‘positive liberty’ or material freedom through the State.3 Yet, ensuring one person’s (say, Ram’s) negative liberty does not significantly affect another person’s (say, Shyam’s) negative liberty unless one insists that murder or theft is liberty. But ensuring Ram’s positive liberty of cradle-to-grave State support does mean downgrading Shyam’s negative liberty with respect to his personal property.

But it is communism and socialism that promote materialism by placing primacy on achieving material equality for individuals through State coercion. The very notion that the material equality of individuals should be the yardstick by which to measure the morality of a society betrays the obsession of the Left with materialism.

Charles Wheelan observed, ‘market economy is to economics what democracy is to government: a decent, if flawed, choice among many bad alternatives.

writer, poet and lyricist Javed Akhtar observed: I believe that at any point in history, we can see that art, literature, and music and the contemporary socio-political movements are not in watertight compartments. They reflect one another. There was a sort of moral decline in the 1980s. Our sense of values had nose-dived. There is no doubt that in those years, the worst kind of film was being made in India, and by and large, the worst kind of film music was appreciated. Compare this to the era of 1950s, a time when the best film songs were written. A time when culture, decency and idealism prevailed, those were the days of Jawaharlal Nehru.

controlled, constricted economy forces individuals to enter a very specific, limited pool of professions. It also forces individuals to cultivate political connections, besides straitjacketing society into sacrosanct hierarchies—this is the experience India had until the dawn of economic liberalisation in 1991, before which even the wealthy lived in mortal fear of politicians. In contrast, a freer economy accepts individuals as they are and allows them to grow into what they want to become—whether it is an entrepreneur, musician, actor, radio jockey, chef, business executive, danseuse, doctor, fitness instructor, fashion designer, singer or stand-up comedian. It is no coincidence that there has been an explosion of different types of professions in India only since liberalisation took off. If somebody in the 1980s was told that India’s youth could one day aspire to become dieticians, make-up artists or interior decorators, they would simply not have believed it because these professions did not exist as legitimate, remunerative career options.

American artist Andy Warhol made this observation once, on the beauty of American-style capitalism: What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking.

Two events marked the broader acceptance of entrepreneurship as a ‘respectable’ path in the eyes of the older generation. The first was the emergence of Ratan Tata as a VC investor after he retired as chairman of the Tata Group in 2013. The most recognised and respected Indian businessman in the last three decades started making investments in technology ventures from his personal funds. Almost overnight, what was seen as a speculative, even reckless, activity acquired a halo of respectability.

The second was the sale of Flipkart to Walmart in 2018 for over 1 trillion, which remains the biggest acquisition in India’s new technology industry and turned many early employees and backers into multi-millionaires. These two events changed the perception of technology entrepreneurship by enhancing the social acceptability of starting a new venture.

Modi has understood that India needs to have Thomas Hobbes before John Locke and John Stuart Mill—in others words, order precedes liberty and freedom. Without order, there can only be anarchy.

India’s size of government is anyway smaller compared to many Western countries where such libertarian rhetoric may find a wider audience. India’s problem is having ‘State flab’ in the wrong places in the government and no muscle in areas that matter. There are bloated ministries at the Centre as well as in the states, but many vacancies in departments entrusted with actually executing critical programmes and policies.

The brief of the civil services is to execute the policy of the government of the day. The argument that the bureaucracy acts as a check on the whims and fancies (even corrupt proclivities) of the politicians isn’t sound. That’s not their job, but that of other institutions entrusted specifically with the task of maintaining transparency.

An analysis of the executive record sheets of over 2,000 officers with at least a decade in service shows that only 7.9 per cent of the IAS officers remain in one post for more than two years.

An October 2015 study conducted by IIM Ahmedabad that was commissioned by the Government of India found that ‘Government is paying higher salaries compared to the private sector … for jobs at the lower levels of skill requirement and hierarchy (but) salary in government is relatively lower compared to the private sector, particularly in later years, for some highly skilled jobs.’

Article 311 of the Constitution23 gives such near ironclad job security that ‘an employee has to be a sexual offender or a lunatic before the government will act against him or her,’ as T.C.A. Srinivasa Raghavan writes.

Economist Sanjeev Sanyal has opined that India needs a ‘Transparency of Rules Act’ so that all rules and procedures are notified in real time on the website of the relevant government agency or department, in one coherent document, rather than as a series of circulars.

Jaideep Prabhu has noted how the declassification of government documents and the opening up of the National Archives could cure the Indian establishment’s allodoxaphobia, or fear of opinions.

A large consumer base provides what experts call partial monopsony power to attract investments given the size and growth of the national market. India’s voice will increasingly be heard in global matters even as the average citizen is still poor because the country’s size ensures influence.

James Tooley’s book The Beautiful Tree popularised the existence of low-cost private schools, often operating in the regulatory shadows, in many emerging economies of Asia and Africa.

It is worth studying what has made US institutions markedly better than others in the world. Key factors are ‘national wealth, large population, government support especially of science’ along with the migration of talent from Europe to the US because of the Second World War, and the ‘American habit of private philanthropy’.50 Henry Rosovsky, former dean of Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, also points to certain specific features in the governance structure, such as the fact that all senior and middle management of an institution ‘are appointed, not elected, and they can be dismissed’, and the ‘unitary governance’ approach,51 with the university president being answerable only to the board of trustees and holding full executive responsibility.

Shailendra Mehta, in his analysis of why the US has been so successful in higher education, identifies the key innovation that the US brought, which propelled its universities to the top ranks globally as ‘alumni control of the board of trustees’,52 not surprisingly pioneered by Harvard University, whose board was de facto controlled by alumni starting in 1710, with de jure control cemented in 1865.

India has high economic aspirations with an outdated and decrepit higher education system.

In 2008, the Government of India had introduced the Protection and Utilisation of Public Funded Intellectual Property (PFIP) Bill. The PFIP Bill, modelled on the American Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 that has been described as ‘innovation’s golden goose’,57 aimed to catalyse commercialisation of publicly funded research and creation of incentives for technology entrepreneurship in academia. The Bill was withdrawn in 2014, but there is a strong case for reviving it and for changing it as needed.58

Economist Bibek Debroy has recounted how Columbia University economist Jagdish Bhagwati was ‘essentially made to leave’ the Delhi School of Economics in the 1950s.60 As economist Sanjeev Sanyal has written: The Left dominance over the intellectual establishment has its roots in the systematic ‘ethnic cleansing’ of all non-Left thinkers since the 1950s … the result of the systemic cleansing was that there were no non-Left academics remaining in the social sciences field in India by the early 1990s … there needs to be a wider national debate about bringing greater plurality of thought in India’s intellectual establishment.61 As Sanyal was careful to point out, it is not that ‘the overwhelming dominance of the Left should be replaced by a similar dominance of the Right’. What India needs is a marketplace of ideas,

The larger question is whether India needs the entitlements-based, centralised welfare state whose rollout the UPA government accelerated. The question is a complex one, with both normative and positive aspects, because there is a lot of confusion between ‘how much help’ and ‘how to help’. The latter is more of a policy question, whereas the former is a political one.

Justice Chelameswar was right in stating: The assumption that primacy of the Judicial Branch in the appointments process is an essential element and thus a basic feature is empirically flawed without any basis either in the constitutional history of the nation or any other and normatively fallacious apart from being contrary to political theory.

Notably, of the 1293 judgments delivered by the Supreme Court in 2019, just 3.3 per cent dealt with the Constitution.

Where there is knowledge and wealth, power is sure to follow—Saraswati and Lakshmi are joined by Durga, the Goddess of war.

Vijay Kelkar, chairman of the 13th Finance Commission and former finance secretary, had said in 2012 that a 10 per cent GDP growth rate was the best foreign policy for India.

Trade can, and is being, used as a strategic instrument. Money talks a bit more, now that muscle walks a bit less.