Edging Past Sixty: Towards a Strategic Stock-taking of the Republic

Abstract

This essay, addressed to the intelligentsia of the country, on the one hand, and the nation's political class, on the other, makes a case for a ‘National Dialogue’ for taking stock of the record of the post-independence Indian State, yet a work-in-progress in many ways, in a forward-looking perspective by bringing together three key constituencies of the national polity: political activists (and others from civil society, business, commerce, and media circles) working at the grassroots level apex level State functionaries expert observer-media analyst-academic-scholar ‘commentariat’. Such a deliberation can, drawing lessons from experience, throw up an agenda for structural reform that goes beyond mere governance issues and identify (people-centred) pathways for rendering the institutions of the Republic more functional and efficacious in translating its elegantly egalitarian founding vision, enabling an environment of opportunity, into reality more substantially and substantively. It could make an exploration, in other words, of possibilities of corrective intervention at the base of the ‘structure strategy processes behaviour outcome’ (performance determinant) model posited in organizational theory and ‘strategic management’ literature, extrapolated to a State setting. And, in the process, attempt an eclectic revisiting of the grand Nehruvian poser about a structural-strategic stance seeking (to craft) a “just State by just means”, albeit more from an efficacy (i.e. ‘raison d'etat’) standpoint now (in the light of experience). With fine-tuning of the apparatus of the Republic for maintenance of socio-political stability in the country in the face of new mega-trends in the global politico-diplomatic arena — international terrorism, the emerging binding constraint of global warming, the global turn to neo-liberalism sans serious striving for equitable global governance mechanisms and other challenges stemming from the global geo-political and geo-economic dynamics — as the critical consideration. The (radical or other) reform options examined would need to build upon the gains of firm grounding of political pluralism and constitutionalism, and flowering and deepening of democracy — on the social emancipation and political empowerment fronts, above all � made in the first six decades, while bracing up for the future: the challenge of conceptualizing (structural) change conducive for ‘coherent synergizing’ of the institutions of the State and spawning of an alternative politics evocative of the transformative ethos of the early post-independence years.