Constitution of a Nation
The Creed of Indian Nationalism
A Constitution of a Nation must derive itself from the sense and word of God, from the dominant impulse of a higher Light, but it must be a derivation of a spiritual sense based on self-experience of the Divine as the true ruler of the Nation, not a religious declaration of a few precepts and commandments which are nothing more than a monstrosity leading the Nation away from its higher ideal and true progress. Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence was a right move towards building a free, viable model of a society based on a firm foundation of freedom as an inalienable part of human necessity, but freedom still of a mental light of reason and a movement of a human idea of freedom. There is something of the essential principle of a godward movement, a high moral sense of the human element in the idea and principle of the Declaration, the sense of a free human society enshrined in its every word and letter, but there is also a limitation in its idea of freedom which is not visible to the intellectual eye or perceptible to the normal human sense. Freedom and unity are watchwords of the Spirit and of the spiritual Truth, and the human idea of them translated per se into their minds and experienced by them is completely different from the way it is experienced in the higher perception of the Spirit. If Jefferson was a Yogin, he would have seen the loose strands of his own folly running through the hard fibre of a self-declared freedom, hope and human fraternity! For, the idea of freedom does not lend itself to an end in a greater human document of hope and vision; freedom is infinite and lends itself to the idea of a greater expression not bound by the forms of existence or by the grand mental rules of responsibility and self-governing principles, however sublime and noble they are to the reasoning intelligence. Here, we chart our course out into an unknown territory distrusted by science through its endless scepticism and detested by the practical reason of man.
A spiritual freedom is in its very idea and outgoing synthesis a practical or even an inevitable framework for the wider movements of life to be possible, a freedom which entices a higher responsibility free of the shackles of human reason and its incorrigible and self-limiting laws; it is a freedom of light in the reason, guiding the life-movements towards a greater reckoning of the Spirit, a reckoning in which the spiritual revels itself as the dominant force of all freedom of movement, and because it is, therefore we come to the realisation that it is not the human freedom of movement or of the brilliant devising of the intellect of the Jefferson’s, but of the primal impulse of God immanent in the great imperious flow of Nature and her complex movements. Life and Mind bound to their own shackles and administered a dose of freedom into their particular movements are not the last ideal to the term and movement of a higher spiritual freedom, which is a self-existent law of the Spirit and from which comes the sense of a higher governance through its own native forms and procedures. A Constitution so fashioned out of the crucible of Truth becomes a shining blade of the Kshatriya.
The Indian constitution was more of a redraft of the British parliamentary system, if not a blind copying, of the essential structure borrowed freely from the original draft with a preamble, though extensively modified and freshly infused with a life and language of its own, suffering the gross inadequacy of vision and purpose except a proclamation of a secular State and a vibrant model of a working democracy still in its infancy and totally unprepared to meet the challenges of an already divided society on religious lines, the grim reminder of which was witnessed before India became a Republic. It may be argued, in favour of the Constitution of course, that it was one of the widely deliberated and debated issue among the members of the Constituent Assembly with supremely good intentions for the future of a Nation still in its turmoil and pain of geographical amputation of two of its important organs from its mighty physicality, but intentions still serving a narrow end towards extensive control of the spiritual idea for the benefit of the secular, and subsequent amendments to the constitutional book stemmed from an impulse to distort the factual law and appease a particular section rather than uniting all by a singular method of inclusion then enshrined in the first version. In fact, amendments to the Constitutions have been a habit of the Executive since the Indian Constitution was first adopted in 1950, much to the chagrin of the Courts whose judgements were repealed in the Parliament and the Assembly of constituted states by the elaborate mockery of a few vested interests wielding an unbridled power over legislation and enactment of law.
A Constitution which derived itself from the narrow limits of a few good or even extraordinary intellectual minds must inevitably suffer the consequences of their folly and misguided reasoning as it progresses and rather survives barely through countless exploitations and transgressions it has suffered over the years in the hands of men unfit for the high office of governance; there are more instances of subversion of the Constitution and the high political Authority than the instances of a progressive thinking and healthy polity taking centre stage for a selfless moral objective. A sense of an all-inclusive democracy, right to freedom and right to privacy as stipulated and guaranteed in the Constitution, a sense of natural justice for all equally without discrimination on caste or religious lines, a sense of pride and self-belonging to the land and law of the land, to its flag and song, a sense of belonging therefore to a patriotic impulse rising out of its collective humanity is the true secret sense and word of the Indian Constitution and its founding forefathers, though in its application it has been subverted, exploited, maimed of its spirit and rendered impotent by the crass political class most unqualified to be constitutional custodians or representatives.
Even without these glaring contradictions and shortcomings, without subversion of justice and natural process of law, without mindless amendments for selfish political gains or for pleasing a particular section of the society, it is impossible to sustain it for a future progression of things which can only be sustained by a greater spiritual synthesis working out of itself a sure model, and out of it a sure form of self-governance. The high Priest of the Veda is and must be the supreme word of self-governance, of all movement of freedom and unity, and his knowledge and light the guiding force of humanity’s thought and action towards the very idea of a Nation founded on the principle of a higher divine Truth and Consciousness. But the priest of the Sacrifice is not the Brahmin but the Kshatriya. The Krishna of the Gita is always symbolic of the divine Godhead leading his humanity beyond all weakness and self-despair to the absolute ether of His illimitable existence, and Arjuna the symbol of a humanity in distress and doubt, in the angst of its pain and thrown onto a precipice of both aspiration and indecisiveness; either it must grow wings and fly into eternity or fall down into a bottomless pit and irredeemable weakness of self. This is very much true of a Nation in the twilight of its transition towards a greater meaning of its existence in a world besieged by a thousand maladies and innumerable ills, and it ought to be understood clearly that nothing worthwhile will come out of it, nothing meaningful or constructive or pragmatic but only a slow or rapid degeneration of its consciousness towards a self-inflicting process of pain and suffering, of stalled growth of its collective consciousness and stalled growth of all its external forms. The strength of a Nation, therefore, lies in the strength and robustness of its Polity whose strength and robustness lies in the strength of its Constitution, and a Constitution, therefore, must be a derivation of a higher Truth and its self-illuminating principles, the sense and word of God translated into a practical synthesis for the humanity to follow.
But why sense and word of an ancient Godhead on a chariot and not of the intellectual? Why at all submit to the invisible and fantastic and not to the sensible and perceptible, to the proven phenomenon? But the sensible and the perceptible are not complete in themselves, for they are a meagre expression of something profound; the visible is an expression of the invisible on the outward in which the visible phenomena carry the secret derivatives of the invisible, its higher mechanisms and workings in the form of a hidden key, the discovery of which is essential to unlocking the higher and more elevated, the secret of the Spirit revealed to the self-submitting mind of aspiration. A Nation or its Constitution divorced from its native roots and founded itself on an intellectual quest of knowledge and mere external growth and proliferation of its industries and institutions is only likely to peter out and fall into shambles of its own chimera, the grotesque and intellectual nemesis of the inevitable Mayday, for its material impetus will run out of its limited potency and vigour of growth as it moves into uncharted territories. A devising of the material mind, whether of its polity or its numerous systems, cannot be sustained in a rapidly changing scenario of the world, much less its original foundation built on a vast but brittle material intelligence and scientific outlook. It may be imagined, though wrongly of course, that a sense and devising of a set of laws out of a greater spiritual knowledge of the Gita or the Veda is bound to be detrimental to the fabric of democratic and pluralistic institutions based on an accord of human harmony and principle of fraternity, but a society or Nation already divided on caste and religious lines is bound to be a failure in the long run, the signs and symptoms of which are quite apparent and perceptible even the surface understanding of men; these present indications represent a great danger to the Indian polity and therefore, to the Constitution. If human predilections and political compulsions alone define the nature of constitutional amendments, a change therefore of its essential structure is highly needed to prevent the misuse and undermining of its authority. But there is already a spiritual change in the offing, the breath of the divine Godhead passing through the frailty of human systems and man-made laws, and it is more likely to dismantle the existing structures for the reposition and reestablishment of an ancient Dharma renewed by the vigour of a greater divine manifestation here in the terrestrial, and out of which will arise the guidebook of the Divine, the framework for the innate laws of the Spirit to be established here as a spiritual authority subservient only to God and His dictates.
