5 feb 2024 समाज कितना जागरूक

Removed ‘Socialist’ and ‘Secular’ from preamble 

१ During the inaugural session of the new Parliament, controversy shown after Members were gifted copies of the Indian Constitution, wherein the Preamble appeared to have dispensed with the terms ‘Socialist’ and ‘Secular’.

.

२ The meaning or character of our popular sovereignty

🍁It is often treated as a convenient myth or as a purely abstract अमूर्त  assumption मान लेना in our civil society discussions. 

🍁scholar Sarbani Sen argued in her book - 

 The Constitution of India: Popular Sovereignty and Democratic Transformations, the revolutionary potential of the Constitution inheres in this very spirit of popular sovereignty.

🍁 She looks at ‘how the idea of popular sovereignty and its relation to constitutionalism developed as a result of inter-generational discourse  गंभीर चर्चा (भाषण या लेख) in Indian political thought during the pre-founding colonial period’.

3 preamble प्रस्तावना - 

स्पष्ट रूप से सभी भारतीय नागरिकों के लिए न्याय (सामाजिक, आर्थिक और राजनीतिक), स्वतंत्रता (विचार, अभिव्यक्ति, विश्वास, विश्वास और पूजा की), और समानता (स्थिति और अवसर की) सुनिश्चित करने के संदर्भ में गणतंत्र के वैधीकरण के लक्ष्यों को निर्धारित करती है। .

4 When we reduce sovereignty of the “political community” to mere state sovereignty, we reduce the constitutional promises given above to vague aspirations floating in ether. 

जब हम "राजनीतिक समुदाय" की संप्रभुता को केवल राज्य की संप्रभुता तक सीमित कर देते हैं, तो हम ऊपर दिए गए संवैधानिक वादों को आकाश में तैरती अस्पष्ट आकांक्षाओं तक सीमित कर देते हैं।.

The elite versus non-elite spheres

The western tradition of civil society

1 They grant such a watchdog function, of counterbalancing the state’s drive to monopolise sovereign power, to an elite public sphere.

2  Counterbalancing the state implies तात्पर्य  : 

constraining बाधा  the excesses of government power. 

3 This liberal public sphere (as described by theorists such as Jürgen Habermas), platformed the educated middle classes, held to be engaged in a rational discourse centred on individual autonomy and self-interest.

इस उदार सार्वजनिक क्षेत्र (जैसा कि जुर्गन हैबरमास जैसे सिद्धांतकारों द्वारा वर्णित है) ने शिक्षित मध्यम वर्गों को मंच दिया, जो व्यक्तिगत स्वायत्तता और स्व-हित पर केंद्रित तर्कसंगत प्रवचन में लगे हुए थे।

4 The English language arena in India, particularly in journalism and civil society activism, reflexively borrowed from this western discourse the directing role of a modernising elite.

अभिजात वर्ग का आधुनिकीकरण

So “who constitutes this modernising elite?” और कौन सी चुनौतियाँ  

public sphere, tended to privilege the views of segments that skewed / समूह आदि के प्रति पक्षपातपूर्ण male, upper class and dominant castes.

Yet, this elite public sphere has largely remained inert in the face of severe challenges to prevailing constitutional governance.

non-elite counter-sphere 

1 This is the counter sphere of ‘organisations and movements’: 

• social movements, 
• farmers and labour groups,
•  human rights activists, 
• subaltern caste and tribal movements 

2  their powerful examples such as the 

• Una agitation by Dalits against caste-based violence; 
• the Pathalgadi movement of tribals in Jharkhand; 
• the farmers’ movements of Punjab and Haryana; 
• and the nation-wide protests by Muslims (led by women) against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act.

Ambedkar’s framing

B.R. Ambedkar had framed the Preamble

1 According him , in terms of heralding a “way of life, which recognizes liberty, equality, and fraternity as the principles of life and which cannot be divorced from each other: Liberty cannot be divorced from equality; equality cannot be divorced from liberty. 

2 Nor can liberty and equality be divorced from fraternity. Without equality, liberty would produce the supremacy of the few over the many. Equality without liberty would kill individual initiative”.

3 In his essay, ‘Buddha and the future of religion’, he wrote, Buddha also “did not believe that law can be a guarantee for breaches of liberty or equality...In all societies, law plays a very small part.

 It is intended to keep the minority within the range of social discipline.” 

 Gandhi’s conception of swaraj or ‘self-rule’. 

In the monograph, Unconditional Equality: Gandhi’s Religion of Resistance (2016), historian Ajay Skaria explains that ‘Swaraj’ for Gandhi did not confine itself to a mechanistic self-rule,

but a creative process of self-realisation through which one might reach out towards a more secure and substantive plane of freedom and equality. 

The means to achieve Swaraj was thus ‘satyagraha’ (defined as “truth force” and “love force”). “For him (Gandhi), sovereign power is not exemplified only in the state..”.

Having the right dialogue

It becomes clear that a progressive civil society in India can only be a plural civil society, if it is structured on the free and equal participation of every community. Regarding any particular community as socially backward or intellectually inferior (compared to any assumed authentic ‘self’) inevitably skids into perilously unexamined pride.

The path towards a pluralist civil society must, thus, be forged through honest and introspective dialogue.

 This is not the shallow but the commonplace mode of dialogue — a form of debate focused on achieving a framework of objectively correct knowledge. 

But the particular form of dialogue stressed by Gandhi, Ambedkar and modern theorists of deliberative democracy seeks to understand the position of the ‘other’. 

It is through this empathetic engagement with the concerns and the world views of ‘others’ that we can build a stable foundation of mutual self-understanding, thus opening up possibilities for genuine solidarity. 

The alternative is a civil society with little self-knowledge beyond chauvinistic pride, and little agency beyond being the handmaiden of an increasingly authoritarian state.

Source the hindu