What is the national interest?

Differences of opinion on what constitutes the national interest do not necessarily weaken our polity; in many ways they actually strengthen it.

Interestingly, groups and leaders bitterly opposed to one another profess to have the national interest at heart; yet, in all their exhortations, speeches, statements and writings, they never give a precise definition of what it is. If they do attempt to define it, it is as a negative, strangely similar to the neti neti of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, in which Yajnavalka uses the phrase to describe the Divine to his disciples.

The Left will declare the Congress approach to the 123 Nuclear Agreement as not in the national interest; the Congress will, in its turn, see the Lefts opposition to it as being against the national interest.

But neither ever spells out what their specific definition of the national interest is, except, as one has said earlier, in vague generalisations the welfare of the people, the removal of poverty, and so on.

Perhaps that is as it should be in todays world, so far removed from the very narrow interests of Machiavelli and the nation states of his time. The paradox is that the generalisations given by opposed groups are almost exactly the same. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) will, if asked, define the national interest in terms that are almost exactly the same as those used by the Congress. The Congress may emphasise its concern for the aam admi (the common man); the BJP will say that its concern for that unfortunate person is no less, even though it puts it differently.

Nowhere was this seen more clearly than in the recent confrontation between the Left and the Congress over the 123 Nuclear Agreement with the United States. While in 2004 both seemed actually to agree very unusually on what constituted the national interest and prepared what is called the National Common Minimum Programme (CMP), they differed so sharply on their concept of the national interest on the 123 Agreement that the existence of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government became precarious indeed. And all the while both sides declared that their concern was the national interest.

One is tempted to ask whether a government that is supported by groups that have sharply differing ideas of the national interest can function at all; surely, the actual factor that keeps them on the same side their antipathy to the BJP is not enough. Not enough as a shared concept of the national interest, which the CMP is supposed to be.

There have been several occasions when the Left has questioned the governments adherence to the CMP, and yet, after some bouts of intense discussions, which amount basically to making cosmetic adjustments in positions, they have continued. Until the India-U.S. nuclear agreement came up.This time the differences were so sharp that the government was about to fall. The Prime Minister, the usually mild Manmohan Singh, said, frankly, that if the Left wished to withdraw its support to the government so be it. In other words, he was ready for a parting of ways, for the government to fall, for the inevitable elections that would follow. The weeks that followed, in which a formula emerged to keep the government going, while neither side professed to have altered its position, cannot be said to have strengthened the government, or the process of governance, of parliamentary democracy.

Or is that a standard, rather superficial, reading of what actually happened, particularly in the larger context of the nature of Indias democracy? Looking back over the last 60 years, one sees many things that have not helped India move forward, but it would perhaps be a mistake to include among them the rise in the number of differing voices in our polity, whether they are regional or based on caste or some ideology.

There is a natural desire to seek and strive for uniformity because in uniformity there is order, and order is seen as essential to the country moving forward in a coherent, logical manner. But that is not the system we have chosen with which to govern ourselves. Parliamentary democracy implies opposition and argument, and here again it is a mistake to see it exclusively in the manner in which it functions in Britain. We may have borrowed the system from that country, but it has, over the years, been transformed and adapted to the compulsions and tensions of this giant and multifaceted society of ours.

If we have a large number of communities, groups and tribes among us, it would be ridiculous to expect that a system that grew out of the demands of a homogenous society at least more homogenous than ours would remain the same when brought over to India. Consistent with our diversity and volubility, our version of parliamentary democracy would be one full of, indeed bursting with, argument, disputation and noisy disagreement. And so it is. To a very large extent our public life is like the traffic in our large cities chaotic and wild but with a basic direction forward.

The differences spring, naturally, from differing notions of what constitutes the national interest. These differences are, as we all know, not always expressed in measured speeches in Parliament; they are usually expressed in the form of shouting in the legislatures and even in the forms that were perfected during the movement for freedom through demonstrations that can turn violent, through strikes and through what we know as bandhs or hartals, so much a part in earlier years of the non-violent movement devised by Mahatma Gandhi.

The argument that is being advanced here is that the expression, in a variety of ways, of differences of opinion of what constitutes the national interest does not necessarily weaken our polity; in many ways it actually strengthens it.

We have in our neighbouring countries examples of attempts by the military to impose uniformity and what they call order. Both countries have, through the years, been more under the rule of the military; it is only India that has consistently been a democracy, except for the brief period when Indira Gandhi imposed Emergency.

Our democracy has been increasingly fractious, but in that fractiousness has expressed the nature of our society and its inner tensions and turbulence.

Underlying it has been an assumption that the institutions have to function, and they have, just like our traffic, wild and frightening though it can be, actually moved in the direction they are meant to. It is not as if some are trying to go in one direction and some others in the opposite direction everyone on any given side of a road accept that they are going in one direction. Thus, it is usual to see Question Hour in both Houses of Parliament disrupted; but on the whole the Houses function as they are expected to, and business is transacted. That is the strength of our democracy.

And that is also why the opposed declarations of what constitutes the national interest does not necessarily mean that the fabric of democracy has been weakened, even if such declarations may mean that the government of the day falls and elections are held. This has happened a number of times in the past, but because of that India has not become a weak country in any way.

Perhaps, the reality is that beneath all the differences in this country there is a tacit acceptance of certain basic elements that make up our parliamentary democracy.

The acceptance is by all parties and groups because our very diversity is our strength; we know that we have to depend on the firmness of our basic institutions and the assumptions that make them firm because by ourselves we would be mere opinion groups in a giant sea of opinions and beliefs.

And thus it is that the last 60 years have increased and sharpened our awareness of our institutions and while the fractiousness stays, this awareness does, too, and keeps the framework of what was in the first years a fragile and vulnerable democratic system, and is now a turbulent but firm one, rooted in the soil of the country.