📰 Lapsing into contempt
Finding Prashant Bhushan guilty of contempt reflects a low threshold for criticism
•The Supreme Court’s order finding advocate Prashant Bhushan guilty of contempt of court reflects poorly on the institution’s tolerance of criticism. The judgment of a three-judge Bench on the suo motu contempt proceedings against Mr. Bhushan hardly adds to the dignity and majesty of the Court that it ostensibly sets out to uphold. It is unfortunate that two tweets, and not any set of scandalous or scurrilous allegations, have occasioned this heavy-handed treatment. In the 108-page opinion that largely draws upon past judgments delineating the circumstances in which the Court will act in aid of its institutional reputation and authority, there is little more than a perfunctory analysis leading to the finding that the tweets amount to criminal contempt. The first tweet, in which an image of Chief Justice of India S.A. Bobde in an informal setting has been used to make a critical remark that he was denying citizens recourse to justice for fundamental rights violations, may be an exaggerated or even unwarranted view on the absence of physical hearings now. However, it is quite a stretch to say that it undermines the Court’s dignity, lowers its authority or interferes with the administration of justice. At best, it touches partially on the CJI’s personal conduct and partially on his administrative decision-making. Neither part brings with it any exceptional malice or scurrility warranting action for criminal contempt. It is precisely this sort of criticism that the judiciary ought to be able to shrug off.
•The second tweet, in which Mr. Bhushan has blamed the Court, more particularly, the last four CJIs, for “the destruction of democracy” in the last six years, “even without a formal Emergency”, requires no defence. It is clearly in the nature of a political opinion, be it with reference to the working of the institution or the four personages who headed the judiciary during the period. It is difficult to agree that the mere voicing of an opinion that successive CJIs have destroyed democracy would undermine public trust in the judiciary; especially in the backdrop of some former judges, too, holding sharply critical opinion of the conduct of some of them. In its nature, intent and sweep, Mr. Bhushan’s abrasive animadversion of judicial conduct is no more discordant than a former CJI being accused by his colleagues of being under executive influence, or misusing his powers as master of the roster with a view to obtaining favourable outcomes. There is some inadvertent irony in the Court’s claim that allowing Mr. Bhushan’s remarks to go unpunished would lower the country’s image in the comity of nations. The highest court built its stalwart fame on stellar judgments and record of fearless independence. If at all it falls in the estimation of the world now, it may only be because of a growing perception of judicial evasion, self-imposed reticence and quiet acquiescence in the face of executive power.
While celebrating milestones, Indiamust not lose sight of governance challenges
•Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speech on the 74th Independence Day — his seventh consecutive one — on Saturday sought to reassure the nation on the twin challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic and external aggression. He has always used his oratorical skills to foreground concerns that have traditionally not been considered worthy of a Prime Minister’s personal attention. The very fact that he mentioned menstrual hygiene will encourage health workers to be more attentive to the issue and create more awareness. Sanitation and access to drinking water have been issues dear to Mr. Modi’s heart, and the speech reflected that. The Jal Jeevan Mission that seeks to provide piped drinking water to every home, along with the expanding networks of electricity, the Internet, banking and cooking gas, will equip India to rise higher. Slogans such as self-reliance, “vocal for local”, “make in India to make for the world” are just old rhetoric for a new occasion, but their reiteration could spur the state apparatus into action, besides galvanising opinion. Mr. Modi has been an exceptional user of the I-Day pulpit to outline priorities, and deserves credit for it. While celebrating the nation’s milestones, the massive challenges of governance and development must not be glossed over.
•Announcing new schemes that do not resolve, but camouflage, these challenges are of little help. The PM promised to bring a revolution, as the National Digital Health Mission, which will give every Indian a digital health ID that links up all her medical records. But the real issue is the abject lack of primary health facilities in much of India. Digitalisation is welcome but is no substitute for inadequate human resources and infrastructure in the health sector. Mr. Modi also reiterated his vision for India in relation to the world, a tightrope walk of promoting import substitution on the one hand and seeking global partnerships on the other. The challenges in managing such an approach were apparent when he mentioned India’s successes in attracting FDI and talked about self-reliance in manufacturing PPEs in the same breath. He did mention ‘Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam’ — the world is one family — as India’s guiding principle, but his characterisation of its centuries-old interactions with other populations and cultures appeared more in line with his Hindutva politics than with the spirit of the freedom struggle. The construction of the Ram temple in Ayodhya now has the support of most political parties and is on the basis of a Supreme Court judgment, but its mention did not address concerns regarding what it portends for India’s future. Ambitious collective goals can inspire a community, which must be increasingly inclusive as it progresses. Triumphs that are not equally shared are no triumphs at all.
📰 Freedom and identity, the right to be
The aspirational values in the Constitution will make sense only when the average Indian realises the freedom to be
•Tulsidas, who wrote one of the several influential versions of the Ramayana, described Ram Rajya as a place where everyone felt free to do what they were supposed to do and where there was no fear, sorrow or disease. Mahatma Gandhi recognised the values of Ram Rajya as a shared universal consciousness. Underlying the articulation of both these exponents of Ram Rajya was the conception of a citizen as a free being.
Bound by laws
•The final quest of all of life is freedom. This means that life as we know it is not free. We are all struggling from bondage to freedom. What binds us? We are bound by one law or the other. What is a law? Any event or phenomenon that repeats itself is a law. For example, an apple seed will always produce an apple. This seed will keep on producing apples — perhaps one million apples will come from that one seed. An apple seed will not produce bananas because an apple seed is bound by its own law — it is programmed to produce apples. All of nature is nothing but an expression of laws — the repeated occurrence of form and phenomena. By this law a fish learns to swim and an eagle learns to soar in the sky. By this very law our hearts beat 72 times a minute and our body temperature is maintained at 98.6° Fahrenheit. So to break a law is to go against nature and risk one’s life.
Finding freedom
•Can we, therefore, ever be free? We can, provided we learn to look beyond nature’s law-bound forms toward something deeper that is always free. This is slightly difficult to explain, but one can try. Take a long rope and tie it into a knot in the middle. As you tighten the knot it takes a definite shape. The knot is bound by its own nature. If the knot were alive, it would imagine itself to be a knot that is limited within the shape of the knot. But someone who has tied the knot will know that all that it requires for the knot to be free is to pull at the right place — the knot breaks free and straightens into a rope again.
•So what is required to find freedom is just this knowledge that you are not a knot. Just this awareness that if you look beyond your physical form to your original state, which is formless and free, you indeed become free. What is that formless state? Classical Indian wisdom calls this state adhyātma . The compound word adhyātma is a combination of two words, adhi + atma which means awareness of self. The human body-mind complex is animated and powered by this spiritual dimension called atma that can be described as soul or self. The body is the hardware, the mind is the software and atma is the UPS (uninterruptible and independent power source). That which sets a human being free is the knowledge of the self — that spontaneous animating principle which runs the body-mind complex. Living in the light of atma or self is the true meaning of Swarajya. Etymologically, Swarajya means, swena rajate or self-luminous existence. Take the case of a person who burns his lips while sipping a cup of hot tea. He may think that the tea has burnt him. It is not the tea but the invisible heat that permeates the tea that has burnt him. Heat is not a property of the tea but it can pervade the tea and make it appear to be hot. Likewise, it is the atma that permeated the body mind that is responsible for our experience of the world.
On choices
•Many people confuse freedom with multiplication of choices. Multiplication of television channels, political outfits, or shampoo brands tend to confuse us rather than help us choose better. Fewer good options would have been a better way to weed out undesirable options. At its core, freedom is not about choices; it is rather about identity. Do I get identified with a compulsive and conditioned mind-body or do I identify myself with a liberated self that refuses to be labelled by the market, polity or society as belonging to a pre-deterministic category? The free being that is our self, expresses itself not through an algorithm but awareness.
•In the Mahabharata, in a deep dialogue, Yakhsa asks Yudhishthira this question, What is the strangest thing in this world? Yudhishthira responds: The most startling thing is, though humans have a mortal body, everybody goes about their life as if they are going to live in their body forever.
•The awareness of atma , inherent in pure being, sets us free from the illusion that we are nothing more than our bodies and our minds. The knot of illusion that we are this body-mind complex unravels itself as realisation of our being dawns on us. We become aware as the rishis of the Upanishads did, of that Anindavatam svadhaya tadekam , one ultimate being in us that exists freely by itself. How does one access the freedom of pure, uninterrupted power of being? In the stillness of being, not in the quest for being this and that or the other, we find the doorway to our own freedom.
Not being co-opted
•From Ram Rajya to Swarajya is a continuum — the journey from the temporal to the transcendental; from the civic to the sacred. The Preamble of the Indian Constitution promises the delivery of aspirational values of justice, liberty, equality and fraternity for its citizens. They make sense only when the average Indian realises the freedom to be and not be co-opted by the politics of identity, machinations of the market or the dictatorship of the digital world. Swarajya in thought and education that liberates the free being, sa vidya ya vimuktaye , can only rescue India from a myopia of the post-colonial leadership. Until then, Ram Rajya will remain an enchanting utopia.
