Modi must know there is no good governance without freedom
The plight of citizens in the public domain is the acid test of good governance. Good governance is not merely what is done to them. It is, even more essentially, what citizens are allowed and empowered to do for themselves.
The seed of good governance is the freedom to fully be and the empowerment to serve the common cause in the fullness of one's realised potentialities. It is incompatible with human underdevelopment and its correlates of fear, exclusion, discrimination and alienation.
The foremost enemy of freedom is coercion to conform or to adapt mechanically. Freedom is the very breath of life; so it captures the essential features of life, like diversity, uniqueness and unregimented growth towards fullnesss of life.
Living in society, at the same time, involves adaptation. But the adaptation required of citizens must be harmonious with the essence of good governance. Regimentation, excessive centralisation, bureaucratic control and an ambience of intolerance denote bad governance.
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| Narendra Modi is the exemplar of the free man. (PTI) |
It is of utmost importance, hence, to understand "adaptation" aright. We think of adaptation mostly as passive conformity. At the same time, we also insist on individualistic ideals like the right of every human being to be fully and authentically oneself. The fact that this is in conflict with our idea of adaptation is ignored.
This throws up a crucial question: What is our idea of adaptation? Or, what is the kind of conformity that agrees with good governance?
We know how inanimate objects - wax, molten lead etc - conform to their moulds. They simply accept the form prefixed. Once adaptation is gone through, the finished product remains and there the matter ends.
Unlike this, the human adjustment to the given context happens in two phases. In the first, the individual adjusts to the given context. The dominant role is that of the social context, to which the individual gets habituated.
Even this is, unlike that of inanimate things, an active process. During this phase, the individual encounters and explores the given context. At each step she "encounters," not just embraces the given. A process of selection happens as to what is adapted to, and what is sidestepped.
In the second phase - the more active and uniquely human phase - the individual adapts the given context to herself. An animal gets used to its habitat; and so does not reach the second stage.
The most significant thing about living a civilised life is our ability and freedom to transform our society. This happens as a byproduct of the human quest for attaining the fullness of one's selfhood and scope.
An essential mark of a civilised and sane society, wrote Bertrand Russell, is the freedom it grants to individuals to express their personal essence - initiative, vision, imagination, value system - through their life and work in the public sphere. This must be deemed basic to good governance. If this is suppressed, we hark back to savagery; no matter with what fineries or fripperies of modernity we surround ourselves by way of progress.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi stands out for being truly, fully and powerfully himself in the public sphere. He is the exemplar of the free man. This is admirable. His predecessor is alleged to have been remote controlled. The ridicule oozing out of this allegation is an emphatic endorsement of our present argument.
The question remains, hence, if anything even remotely proportionate to this is available to citizens, in their limited contexts: if the freedom to be, has increased or decreased under the umbrella of proffered good governance?
For long we have been hearing about honest officers and whistleblowers being hounded and crushed for hindering the corrupt practises in vogue. Many of us have experienced oppressive pressures -in varying degrees and ways - to conform to norms and obligations thrust on us. Some of us have paid the price for not playing quid pro quo, which looms large as our unofficial national game.
As a rule, a society is best served by those who adapt in the human, and not in the inhuman or sub-human, way to its norms and practises. Slaves of status quo can never be pioneers or engine-drivers of progress.
A human being adapts not only by conforming, but also by transforming; not only by accepting, but also by rejecting; not only by belonging, but also by being the outsider within, who is driven by visions and dreams currently unknown to, or misunderstood by, the masses. Such are the germinating seeds that whisper new hopes for tomorrow.
A society that imposes abject conformity and denies its members the freedom and space to express what is creative and even revolutionary in them will condemn itself to stagnation: the stagnation out of which, over millions of years we emerged by ceasing to stay savage in our unsteady, lumbering march to civilisation. It is not enough to trumpet good governance. Citizens need to be assured that such governance is animated by the mindset of civilisation, not of savagery.