India's constitution and politics

Change is the new vogue word in the liturgy of Indian politi cal practice. It is an attractive word in the Indian context. For much of India life still responds to ossified concepts of social and economic organization which have little relation to the challenges of the maturing decades of the 20th century.

Change we certainly have got in plenty, especially in the last twelve-month period. But the claim by some political parties that we are in the middle of a transformation which will modernise life by bringing new social values into play is the result of an over-heated imagination. Outside the pro fessional political arena nobody believes that anything of the kind is happening, and what some of us mistook in the hectic days of bank nationalisation as the exhilaration of the masses at the dawn of a mighty upsurge of new life is now revealed as the cynical manipulation by a political machine of the awakened hopes and expectations of the common man.

From then on we have been through a bewildering succes sion of exercises in the power game, each more morally in sensible than the last. Defections and the toppling of govern ments in the States have been brought about with the brazen use of all manner of inducements and, where they do not work, of threats. We have seen the steady running down of the administrative apparatus, a consciously cultivated per missiveness on the question of the maintenance of law and order and, in the case of West Bengal, the deliberate neglect by the Centre of its constitutional obligations. We are getting used to the open expression of resentment by those in autho rity at the independence of the judiciary. We have seen the fragmentation of the party system and the negation of the normal standards of loyalty has become the test of radical thinking. Opportunism masquerades as a call to conscience. All this adds up to a debasement of the operative standards of political morality to a point where it constitutes a dire threat to the survival of democracy.