India is celebrating its 78th Independence Day; and rightly so, every Indian celebrates this moment of freedom. Streets and campuses are decorated with the tricolour; we hoist our flag, we salute the flag, and we sing the national anthem. We celebrate our sovereignty and democracy, which arguably is the highest form of governance that humanity has arrived at so far.
As Indians are on the streets celebrating its 77th anniversary of independence, ironically, there are also people on the street, mainly women, protesting against the rape of a trainee doctor on duty in RG Kar medical college hospital in Kolkata; and the attempt of the powerful to derail the course of the investigation. These ironies continue in a country that boasts of as the mother of democracy.
Seventy-seven years into independence. Many are the policies passed against violence on women, and against many other social evils and injustices; the present government even has changed the name of the official penal code from Indian Penal Code to Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, in the pretest of making it more modern and competent. And violence against women; and atrocities of other kinds, be it corruption, bribery, or exploitation continue to happen.
It may be an irony, but I take courage to say, what we need is true freedom. Lack of genuine freedom will either make us submissive to others, ideologies, institutions, and governments naïvely, or it will make go out of control, there will be anarchy. Between these two is the fine line called freedom. A very tough set of laws and government will make the people submissive by force and people will have no role to play and this no freedom. A very careless and sloppy set of laws and government will permit everyone to take law into their hands, conduct themselves as and how they want; and the society can go out of control and it will strip people and society of their dignity.
Freedom is an inside thing. I would call it with the political term, ‘self governance’. Self-governance refers to the exercise of authority over oneself - whether that is at the individual, organisation or national level - without outside interference. It is the ability of individuals to take responsibility for their actions and the actions of their community. It instills a sense of ownership, enabling people to recognise that they are the architects of their lives. It gives them satisfaction and fulfilment.
One governing one-self would mean to have a personal/collective moral, spiritual, civic compass. Look at any human heroes that you admire, be in Gandhiji, Ambedkar, Sri Buddha, or even Jesus. They all moved ahead with a personal moral, spiritual, and civic self-compass. A self-compass is self endorsed rules that one finds congruent within oneself. Thus it is easy for one to be whole-hearted behind the things one doing.
In the gospel we find Mother Mary, often shown as a naïve, simple woman; but in truth she just did not get lost in the socio-religious fabric of her times. She was guided by a personal moral, spiritual, civic compass. In Like 1: 39-56, we find Mary leaving her home in haste to her cousin, Elizabeth, to take care of her who was in need. No laws or people have forced her to do that; she was guided by her inner moral, spiritual, civic compass.
I was recently listening to a podcast about a Malayalam poem, called Enna puzhukkal, meaning, Oil worms, written by Vailopally Sreedaramenon. The interesting poem begins with a little boy’s instinctual urge to kill a worm that was passing by. Seeing it, his mother told him, Appu Dhrohikkaruthu, meaning do not harm, do not kill. The boy looked at mother for the reason. Mother, out of the blue fabricated a reason, and told Appu that those worms are carrying oil for gods to apply on their bodies and take bath. Hearing the association between worms and gods, Appu never ever killed a worm. Time passed, Appu became an adult, in the process he lost faith in gods; now through his rational reasoning he knew that worms have nothing to do with gods. But the poem continued saying, but still he would not kill a worm because whenever he saw a worm the words of his mother came to him, Appu dhrohikkaruthu; it had become engrained into his character. The poem ends saying that Appu not only refused to kill a worm, but also never wanted to kill any other creatures. Beyond gods, family, and society he had formed a personal moral, spiritual, civic compass.
Peter T Leeson’s book, Anarchy Unbound (2014) tries to establish that self-governance works better than we think. The book challenges the conventional academic wisdom with respect to self-governance.
The conventional academic wisdom is that self-governance works when society is small, society is homogenous (their beliefs, and ethics etc. are same), interaction is infinitely repeated (no social constrains, like, untouchability, etc,) violent capacity (power to physically force some one to act or being physically strong) is limited or distributed equally, discount rates are low (bad apples are rare).
The question with regards self-governance is that, what if society is large, everybody is socially different, people are extremely impatient, violence capacity is asymmetrical, and people are unlikely to interact with each other repeatedly? But under these circumstances even other forms of governance fail.
Self-governance looks like anarchy, but once people have the capacity for self-governance, meaning, a personal/collective moral, spiritual, and civic compass, that society will perform and live at its best.
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