The Hindu Business Line : `Law of the Unenforceable'

FROM an Italian village girl who went to Cambridge to work as an au pair to the post of Prime Ministership of the world's largest democracy is such a far cry, it can beat the story of Cinderella or Snow White. "Even Hollywood," said the Time magazine "might hesitate at the story of a beautiful Italian girl who follows her prince to a faraway land to find love, tragedy and heartbreak before triumphing as leader of her new people."

H. L. Mencken described American democracy as a "boobocracy" of, by and for the "vast herd of human blanks" who have neither the interest nor the capacity for intelligent self-government.

"India's besetting sin," said Nani Palkhivala, "is secular fundamentalism. We interpret our Constitution as if it were an exercise in grammar. We are intelligent enough to know full well that we are abusing and mocking at the Constitution by merely construing it literally. We are so lacking in intellectual integrity that we pretend to have complied with the Constitution."

"Sonia does a Gandhi," screamed a financial daily on its front page. Why did Sonia Gandhi suffer the pangs of conscience after being elected the Congress Parliamentary Party leader?

Sir Thomas Taylor of Aberdeen University refers to the `Law of the Unenforceable'. Beyond the sphere of duty that is legally enforceable, there is a vast range of significant behaviour in which the law does not, and ought not to, intervene. This power of self-discipline is the very opposite of the fatal arrogance which asserts, whether in government, industry or personal behaviour that whatever is technically possible is licit. Through history, men have needed it to preserve them from the temper which hardens the heart and perverts the understanding.

Society learned to obey the law of the unenforceable which is difficult to practice or inculcate in an age characterised by escalating violence, intemperate thirst for power and social and ideological conflicts. Far from having learnt the value of obedience to the unenforceable, we have a growing tendency not to show obedience even to the enforceable laws. We have allowed the moral bedrock of our society to turn to lava.

As early as in 1701 A.D, England enacted the Settlement Act stipulating that the monarch must be a Protestant and that foreigners must not hold public office or enter Parliament. The American Constitution forbids foreigners from aspiring for the Presidency. The Republic of Italy is a Roman Catholic Theocratic State.

The supreme reality of our time and land is our indivisibility as joint heirs to the finest composite culture the world has ever known. India's is a broad-based, tolerant, secular society. And the absence of a specific Constitutional provision is seen as permitting what honour forbids.

"Politics," said J. K. Galbraith in a letter to President Kennedy, "is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable." It was Lord Byron who graphically described how a thousand years scarce serve to form a state; an hour may lay it in the dust.

There is a constitutional functionary who has a right to be consulted, a right to be informed and a right to warn. It is tempting to believe that he acted at the right time. Ultimately it was the `Law of the Unenforceable' that prevailed.

(The author is a former Chief Commissioner of Income-Tax.)