Kodaikanal Gandhi Prize 2022, Honourable Mention - Gurparas Singh

The Kodaikanal Gandhi Prize 2022

Honourable Mention

GURPARAS SINGH

If we want to cultivate a true spirit of democracy, we cannot afford to be intolerant. Intolerance betrays want to faith in one’s cause.

Young India, 2-2-21, p. 33

Such great were the views of the father of the Indian nation, Mahatma Gandhi, who framed Indian democratic system on the anvils of tolerance, persuasion and argument. With this message of compassion and true spirit of democracy, the great father departed his soul from the mortal land leaving the people of his country an inspiration to try develop a system where every individual feels safe to put forward his views.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on 2nd October 1869 in Porbandar, Gujarat, when India was constrained by the cuffs of slavery and captivity at the hands of the British Government. Mahatma Gandhi began his career as a lawyer in Bombay, but couldn’t prevent his inclination towards independence from leading him to the path of a national leader and a freedom fighter. Mahatma Gandhi led his people to the path of independence with the torch of non-violence and peaceful methods. Soon, India was no longer the same bird trapped in cage for decades and restrained from independence, but a bird which leaped high in the sky of freedom.

Gandhi was the youngest kid born to his father’s fourth marriage. His father, Karamchand Gandhi, served as dewan (chief minister) of Porbandar, the capital of a minor British-ruled principality in western India (in what is now Gujarat state). Karamchand Gandhi didn’t receive a formal education. He was, nonetheless, a capable administrator who knew how to work with the unpredictable princes, their patient citizens, and the tyrannical British political authorities. Putlibai, Gandhi’s mother, was completely absorbed in religion, had no need for finery or jewellery, divided her time between her home and the temple, frequently fasted, and spent days and nights caring for her family when they fell ill, exhausting herself in the process. Gandhi’s views on democracy:

Gandhi outlined ‘Democracy’ as the art and science of utilising all of the human population’s material, financial, and spiritual resources for the benefit of the entire population. The impact of the concept goes beyond politics and popular culture. Instead, it is a belief in equality, fairness, and fair play that is at once materialistic, spiritual, and utilitarian. He believed that in a democracy, the weakest people should have the same opportunities as the strongest. He suggested using nonviolence as a tool to achieve that aim. For him, nonviolence was more than just a guiding principle in all conflicts with injustice; it was a way of life. He actually turned nonviolence into a way of life. Gandhi had an experimental and scientific attitude, fundamentally. He tested his ideas in the furnace of his own experiences which helped him to alter the details of the program as per the present conditions in order to meet an emergency as or when it arrived in the matter of concern. This flexibility and experimental attitude of the Gandhian principle allowed it to be applicable despite the country or the age involved, provided that necessary modifications in the technique was made as per the need.

Relevance of ‘Claiming the right of free opinion and free action as we do, we must extend the same to others. The rule of majority when it becomes coercive, is as intolerable as that of a bureaucratic minority.’:

The fundamental institution on which the parliamentary system of government is based is that of periodic elections. In fact, elections have become the linchpin on which the entire constitutional apparatus of parliamentary government hangs. The enormous importance given to elections tends to adequate democracy with the majority rule. In effect, this so-called, majority rule is only the rule of a minority. Under a system of franchise as we have in India or in Great Britain, it is possible for a government to command a majority in the Parliament on the basis of minority votes. It is an unavoidable adjunct of the present system. Even taking for granted that a genuine majority rule, i.e., the rule of 51 per cent, of the electorate is established, can it be equated with genuine democracy? Gandhi&# concept of democracy was not limited to formal adherence to the external mechanism of the parliamentary type of government. His approach was essentially moral. He did not believe in the priority of political mechanism to One’s own conscience. In 1920, he wrote: ‘...in matters of conscience the Law of Majority has no place.’

The next year he commented: ‘Let us not push the mandate theory to ridiculous extremes and become slaves to resolutions of majorities. That would be a revival of brute force in a more virulent form. If rights of minorities are to be respected, the majority must tolerate and respect their opinion and action... It will be the duty of the majority to see to it that minorities receive a proper training and are not otherwise exposed to insults, swaraj will be an absurdity if individuals have to surrender their judgment to majority.’ Individual freedom, according to Gandhi, is the essence of democracy.

If the people are understood in the way the romantics suggest, as an organic whole or as a kind of over soul, it is not difficult to see that this approach can justify the most tyrannical rule. In the name of the whole each and all can be crushed one at a time. In fact, no democracy properly called takes the people in organismic, romantic meaning of the term. In practice, democracies break up that compact entity, resort to counting, and are concerned with majorities. A people, understood as the absolute right of the majority to impose its will on the minorities seems, therefore, to be the first and acceptable meaning of the term. Yet it is not quite so assuming that the victorious 51 per cent count for everybody and the losing 49 per cent do not count at all, the winners are in a position to prevent the losers return to power. One can come to the conclusion that only the last meaning of people while recognising majority rule nevertheless protects minority right can be regarded as correct interpretation and a working solution. Thus the notion of people fits in a democratic system only if understood in its most elusive technical meaning of requiring majority rule to be limited by minority rights.

The analysis of the meaning of ‘people’ implies also a problem of historical referents. When the term demokratis was coined, the people concerned were the demos of a Greek polis, a small tightly knit community, operating on the spot as a collective deciding body. Now, when the etymological theory of democracy, so to speak attempts to illustrate tangibly ‘Who are the people’? What it recalls is the Greek demos, whereas little if any attention is paid to the fact that the larger a polity becomes the less does the concept of people designate real community, and the more does it. The rule of majority has a narrow application, i.e., one should yield to the majority in matters of detail. But it is slavery to be amenable to the majority no matter what its decisions are....Democracy is not a state in which people act like sheep. Under democracy, individual liberty of opinion and action is jealously guarded. I, therefore, believe that the minority has a perfect right to act differently from the majority...’. (Young India, 2.3.22)

Gandhi’s democratic government was not based on the coercion of even a minority but on the conversion of it. In his opinion, the rule of majority, when it becomes coercive, is as intolerable as that of a bureaucratic minority. ‘Further elaborating his views, he said in 1944: The way of approaching a question is not to examine the numerical strength of those behind the opinion, but to examine the soundness of opinion on merits, or also we will never reach a solution, and if we reach one, it will be a blind solution, simply because it is the wish of the largest body. If the largest body goes wrong, it is up to me to say you are wrong and not to submit.’ ‘The rule of majority does not mean that it should suppress the opinion of even an individual, if it is sound. Opinion of an individual should have greater weight than the opinion of many, if that opinion is sound on merits. That is my view of real democracy.’

It is clear that Gandhi did not have a high regard for the quantitative principle of democracy. On the other hand, he attached the highest importance to quality irrespective almost of quantity. As a believer in the first principle of moral rectitude of the individual, he asked ‘not to be cowed down by the thought of a small minority.’ For to be in a minority is sometimes a privilege and he would rather love to be in the minority of one. Gandhi’s life shows that he literally lived the life of ‘a minority of one’ and ploughed a lonely furrow for the vindication of the principle he thought to be true.

In matters of conscience the law of majority has no place.

GURPARAS SINGH

BRITISH COED HIGH SCHOOL, PATIALA