It does not need much logic to explain that a nation with a compact society should have a Uniform Civil Code. Conversely, even countries that claim to be the parents of modern day democracy do not change their civil laws based on the religion of the concerned citizen. In effect, they do not tolerate sub-nations within nations. A Uniform Civil Code does not mean imposition of Hindu laws on Muslims and Christians. A committee of eminent individuals representing various religions, as well as judicial experts, need to be set up to work out the details of such a code. If leaders from certain groups feel that some elements of their civil laws are extremely good, there is every reason why that should be implemented for society at large, irrespective of the origin. Thus, a Uniform Civil Code will incorporate the best from all codes prevalent within the nation. The bottom line is, once a Uniform Code is converged at?it may take years of effort?it must be adhered to by all, without exception.
Implementation of compulsory voting for national and State level elections
One of the major causes of ideological perversion of most political parties today flows from certain intrinsic flaws in our working democratic process. One of these relates to electoral malfunctioning, for example preparation of flawed electoral rolls, booth-capturing, bribing voters, etc. A lot of these problems were set right by honest and courageous election commissioners appointed during the BJP rule. It is hoped that this effort will continue. Another inadequacy relates to the character of politicians. More stringent rules will have to be framed to prevent criminals from contesting elections, while encouraging educated citizens to participate in the electoral process.
A genuine transformational step in this direction will be the implementation of laws that make voting compulsory for all citizens. First, this will prevent demographic?group influence?amplification, where certain motivated groups turn out in droves at electoral booths, while more numerous communities show lukewarm interest. Political parties brought to power by this group?demographic-amplification then tend to respond to the interests of these groups rather than the interest of the nation and society as a whole (as currently happening in UP for example, where only 40 per cent?odd cast their votes, and the effective participation of Muslims increases from 18 per cent to around 40 per cent?assuming block turnout from them; no political formation can afford to neglect a group that generates 40 per cent block votes). Secondly, this will bring into reckoning many marginalised communities that hardly ever vote, and are bypassed by the entire processes of development?thus sustaining socio-economic disparities and potential breeding grounds for left extremists.
The logistical details for implementation of compulsory voting need to be worked out. For example, a pre-requirement is compulsory citizenship card for all citizens?which can be used to electronically transmit information on who has/has-not voted to a centralised citizen database. At the time of voting this card will need to be passed through a reader which will transmit the information through wireless networks to the database, in the process verifying the voter'sidentity as well. A citizen who does not vote in two continuous elections (to the Lok Sabha or the Vidhan Sabhas), or three elections in his lifetime, loses certain privileges, e.g. he/she may be banned from government jobs, or loans from public?and private?sector banks. These are just suggestions, in essence, modern technology can be easily utilised to enhance national security and prevent subversion.
Build-up universities of global excellence, particularly in Technology and Science
The degree of influence a civilisation wields on its contemporaries is reflected in the global status of its institutions of highest learning?to what extent they attract the best students and even teachers from around the globe, and to what extent they drive concepts and methods that determine the frontiers of contemporary knowledge.
When the Hindu civilisation was the world'smost eminent, its universities like Nalanda, Takshashila and Vikramshila were the most coveted centres of learning in the entire contemporary civilised world and attracted students and teachers from all over that world. In our thousand years of decay, our universities became practically non-existent. Post-Independence, we tried to build up institutions of science and technology, but our post-BJP-rule government of anti-Hindu convenience has done everything possible to destroy these institutions of upcoming excellence. Just as one cannot build a Nalanda in every alternate town, we cannot have an IIT in every alternate village. And just as Nalanda will have died an obscure death if its students and teachers were selected on bases other than pure merit, so too would our IITs. These elementary bits of wisdom seem to elude our breed of secular politicians. Since the same breed is quite intelligent in sensing what is good and bad concerning their own interests, the only conclusion is that this breed is being used by our competing nations and civilisations to cynically destroy our contemporary institutions of higher learning.
A good part of the influence and dominance of the Western civilisation is due to their institutions of academic excellence ? MIT, Stanford, Princeton, Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, Sorbonne, Heidelberg and so on. The USSR had set up large academic institutions but partly due to their attitudinal angularities these failed to emerge as global centres of excellence and attracted only the ideologically motivated from around the world. These fell into decline with the demise of communist USSR. Japan and China are also building up their institutions of higher learning, with the former fairly established and the latter improving steadily. In essence, the status and influence of a civilisation is reflected in the degree of global eminence of its institutions of higher learning.
There is a corollary to this. The strength of a nation and associated civilisation in today'sworld is concomitant with it'shold over technology?not only defence technologies but technologies that influence style of life and thinking. One can look back a few years and see how mobile telephoney, digital imaging and the internet have affected people'slives. They have affected all civilisations no doubt gainfully, but more importantly, they have partially mapped the driving attitudinal values of a particular civilisation on to the rest. Our former President Prof. Abdul Kalam had also said repeatedly that a nation'shold over technology represents its strength in the modern world. It follows that if our nation and civilisation have to reach a position of significant influence over other civilisations, it has to become a breeding ground of scientific developments and technological advances. One of the most important means of doing so is to assiduously build up academic institutions of technological excellence.
There are other associated means like having a private sector whose profitability is strongly coupled with its hold over technology, a retail customer base that appreciates quality which in turn flows from technology, etc, but these are not the main thrust of this article. However, it is pertinent to note that if our nation has to become a leader in technology developments, certain associated corollaries will have to fall in place. We will have to give up our penchant for acquiring kudos from cheap intellectual labour as exist today in the form of low-order IT services, and even worse in the form of call centres and BPO'swhich abuse our combination of low white-collar labour costs and slavish hold over English. National glory does not follow from acquiring the status of an international labour inventory. One of our former ministers had stated that IT is ?India Tomorrow?. Probably he did not know how our premier scientific institutions like DRDO, ISRO, etc. were drained of their middle-level scientists by higher-paying jobs for creating software for American insurance companies, migration from older computer systems, and worse, for Y2K.
Our much-acclaimed software companies revel in doing such low-order jobs. How many software products have been generated by these companies, as compared to Microsoft, Oracle, or Google, for example? How many private companies in our country make profits by developing and creating technological products? Precisely none! It has to enter our blood and bones that first, there is absolutely no technological worth in becoming an international provider of cheap intellectual IT-service labour, and second, that Information Technology as commonly understood in India DOES NOT CONSTITUTE technology?technology is communications, image processing, computing hardware, precision equipment and complex machinery, system and process modelling, reactor design, materials science, propulsion from renewable fuels, design of aircraft and UAV?s, and the like. And just as the game of cricket that has diverted our national interest in a myriad sports and games that matter on this earth, this IT pseudo-technology is a diversion that has sapped our ability and interest in becoming a genuine technological power and meander around the edges of the scientific world. As a nation, we need to come out of this drug-addicted state.
Thus looking from various angles it is absolutely clear that if our civilisation is to move ahead in the world of conflicting civilisations, there is no option but to steadfastly nurture and build universities breeding scientific and technological excellence (as also other fields of academics) and symbiotically infusing it into the nation at large. Plans for these developments must be made and assiduously followed. It should also be very clear that one cannot have more than a hundred such institutions ? we should aim for not more than half a dozen, and follow them up with determination. The numbers can increase organically.
Reorganise states on non-linguistic considerations
While there is no doubt that states formed on the basis of linguistic homogeneity provide certain advantages in administration, they also implicitly contain two disadvantages. First, some of these can become too large in which case there will invariably form sub-regions that are financially and administratively neglected, and second and more relevant to our context, they tend to breed sub-nationalism which weakens the emotional bond with the motherland Bharatvarsha and with all her people who live outside the state boundaries. If our nation has to live and expand for at least the next five-hundred years, then this sub-nationalism is like a virus which will weaken our nation slowly but surely from within leading to emotional fragmentation and questioning our survival to that kind of time-scales. Love for one'smother-tongue and local lingua franca is appreciable and fine; it becomes problematic when it acquires territorial associations.
Perhaps the third blunder committed by Jawaharlal Nehru after taking Kashmir to the UN and giving special privileges to minorities unheard of in any democracy, was of foisting states defined on linguistic basis on our country. Ideally, the federal set-up should have about 50-60 states, each made-up of around 10 Lok Sabha (as current) seats, organised purely on the basis of geographical and linguistic homogeneity rather than allowing linguistics to be the sole determinant of intra-state boundaries. We should strive to attain this ideal condition. While it may take time to work this out, in the meantime to offset the first disadvantage mentioned above, the major linguistic states having 25 plus Lok Sabha seats can be worked upon to create smaller ones out of underprivileged regions like e.g. Telengana, Vidarbha, North Bengal, etc.
Completion of planned temple at Sri Ramjanmabhoomi
The struggle for construction of a grand temple at Sri Ramjanmabhoomi is a physical manifestation of the struggle that the Hindu civilisation is enduring against competing civilisations at the abstract level. The temple was destroyed by those who wanted to destroy the Hindu civilisation and annihilate the identity and collective memory of the Hindu people. In contemporary times, the reconstruction of the temple has been stalled by all those who do not want the Hindu civilisation to arise, awake and stand firmly on its own feet, and it may be identified that the forces that are blocking the temple construction are aligned precisely along the four parameters that are resisting the shift of our national equilibrium towards the Hindu Rashtra ? the Muslims and Christians, the casteists and regionalists and the political gangs led by them, the communists with each of their hydra-heads, and the international forces.
The sustained pressure of these groups working in sync has blocked the construction of the temple, in a manner analogous to their symbiotic action that has overthrown India'sfirst Hindu-oriented government. Conversely, it may be said that if and when the temple is indeed fully constructed, it would represent the triumph of the Hindu rejuvenative forces against the opposing forces, and a decisive shift in equilibrium towards the Hindu Rashtra. It is literally like the children'stale of the demon'slife lying in the heart of a sparrow in a far-away land ? even if you cut the demon into pieces it will spring back to life as long as the sparrow is hale and hearty; if you can kill the sparrow, only and certainly will the demon die. The heart of the Hindu nation is in the temple ? build it, and you will see the opposing forces clearing like morning mist ? because in the very process of building you would have fought and trampled over all of them.
(Concluded)
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