An India Reimagined by MN Buch

Author:MN Buch [Buch, M.N.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789353055738
Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited
Published: 2019-05-24T00:00:00+00:00

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Trusteeship and Trust

In any democratic society, there is a social compact to which every member of society is a signatory and which is binding on everyone because it contains the social order that governs that society. The opposite of a social compact is anarchy and the rule of the jungle. In India, the social compact is contained in the Constitution, which lays down what the nation stands for in clear terms in the preamble. It enshrines the principle of equality for all, especially before the law, it gives the fundamental rights of citizens and their fundamental duties, it gives a policy framework to the State for the establishment of a just social order in the chapter on the Directive Principles of State Policy and it provides for the institutional arrangement of the State into the executive, the legislature and the judiciary. The Constitution also ensures that the structure of the Indian State is federal with a strong centripetal bias to hold the nation together, it divides the powers between the federal and state legislatures, and it also contains adequate provisions for dealing with any present or future emergency, contingency, breakdown of the constitutional arrangement of government and for dealing with any unknown situation which has to be handled urgently. In many ways, this is one of the most comprehensive social compacts ever drafted and, for the last sixty-two years, it has withstood the stress and tension of war, national emergency, changing political scenarios and combinations, judicial crises, public agitations and even movements which are aimed at breaking the Indian union. From every crisis we have emerged stronger, thanks largely to the Constitution.

One of the strengths of the Indian constitution is that it creates a trusteeship in which those who are placed in a position of authority are the trustees of the nation, whose owners are the people of India collectively. A person who is in authority is, to quote the Chambers 21st Century Dictionary: ‘in the state of being responsible for the conscientious performance of some task’. Because conscientious performance is the hallmark of trusteeship, accountability for such performance is also a part of trusteeship. The people of India are the trustees in the matter of exercising their franchise and deciding to whom the reins of power will be handed over. To this extent, the very people who are the owners of this nation are also collectively the trustees and must exercise their franchise in discharge of their responsibility. Failure to vote is a betrayal of the trust reposed in the citizens by the Constitution as the arbiters of the question of who will govern the state, the city or the village.

Whereas deciding who will govern is a collective responsibility, governance cannot be done collectively but has to be done by persons empowered to govern. In the matter of governance, there are three equal wings of the State—the executive, the legislature and the judiciary. The sum total of governance, therefore, is the function of the individual members or authorities within

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