T N Ninan: Our feudal democracy
Five hundred years ago, in feudal England, the nobles
had private armies and their own livery. The king depended on the nobles for
money and for horsemen to fight wars. Henry VII changed all that when he came to
power in 1485, ending the 30-year Wars of the Roses (essentially, an endless
feud between rival groups of feudal lords). He abolished the private armies,
reduced his dependence on the nobles by drawing support from the rising middle
classes and the trading community, and established a modern nation-state. Some
version of that needs to be done in contemporary India.
The parallels become obvious when we see that our
“nobles” today are the state satraps — Dame
Mamata in West Bengal, Lord Nitish in Bihar, Mulayam the Duke of UP, Lady
Jayalalithaa in Tamil Nadu, Viscount Modi of Gujarat, Sir Bal Thackeray in
Mumbai, and so on. They each have their horsemen and livery
(parliamentarians with party tags), and their power in the Delhi court depends
on how many “horsemen” they can bring to our contemporary version of the Wars of
the Roses — the Congress taking the place of the House of Lancaster, and the BJP
of the rival House of York.
So long as the king is dependent on these nobles, each
of whom has quasi-autonomous power in their duchies and earldoms, no central
power can assert itself. The private armies in pre-Tudor England essentially
pillaged and plundered; likewise, some of our nobles today honour horsemen
(knights?) who have a record of murder and rape, they indulge in mass transfers
of officials to make them toe the line, arbitrarily arrest cartoonists and those
who ask questions… (you know the rest of the list). The king in Delhi does
nothing because he gets unseated if the nobles withdraw support. It doesn’t help
that the “king’s party” has no local presence to mount a challenge to the nobles
in their duchies. So how does the nation-state function if every national issue
is hostage to the nobles, and dependent on their consent — including which head
of state can visit the country?
One obvious way would be to challenge the power of the
nobles on their home turf, but neither the king’s party nor the main Opposition
seems up to the task. A second way would be to change the rules by which a king
can be unseated — Parliament has to agree on who the new king will be, before
the old king makes way (which is how they do it in Germany). A third way would
be to change the Constitution in another way, so that nobles who align with the
king in the life of one Parliament cannot switch sides without losing their
horsemen — in other words, members of an alliance get unseated if they leave the
alliance mid-term. Henry VII did the equivalent of this by making all nobles
swear a new oath of loyalty in Parliament. So there are a number of ways of
achieving a more coherent national political structure.
The problem is that a constitutional change (necessary
for two of the three solutions available) will require the co-operation of the
very feudal lords whose power of veto in matters on the “central list” is sought
to be minimised. But this may not be an insurmountable obstacle, as it is an
issue on which both Lancaster and York have a common interest; if they combine
their forces, and get some allies to play along, the required two-thirds
majority in the two Houses may be attainable. Henry VII (from the Lancaster
grouping) won over the House of York by marrying one of its heiresses. Could we
think of something similar?!
No comments:
Post a Comment