Every transformative process brings with its fruits some painful scars for healing becomes a liberatory task. To adopt the republican ideals for India was a courageous leap of imagination from the colonial era oppressions, maladministration, and pervasive exploitations by rational masters, and their calculative adventures diminished the very possibility to stand up once again, to dare to dream even if future appears to be hopelessly darker and stranger. And the world was cynical about the potentiality of India as an emerging republic whose past were at equal footing, if not more than that, to the logocentric culture of knowledge tradition, emerged from the Greek, and flourished as enlightenment ideals after Augustine’s city of God banished in disenchantment of the world (Max Weber). The onerous task of the civilized authors ceased to an end the moment other cultures started to practice courage, to dream, to decide for self. It was a true awakening, the freedom from all around tutelage, from outside and within.
Seventy years ago, ‘the dream of contradiction’ and an ‘ethical code of ambiguities’ (Simone de Beauvoir) were firmly established in India, whereas subjects were transformed into the citizenship and the throne of queen, a symbol of divine justice, were replaced by earthly ideals of just and good, for the sake of sacred symbiosis of governors and governed, authority and liberty, freedom and responsibility. It was an age of reason and spirit of will, which witnessed the history in making, amidst the mad dance of blood-thirsty discord, whereas ‘fundamental rights framed against the carnage of fundamental wrongs” (Granville Austin). After seventy years of Indian republic, many a dream have been shattered and a few have been realised in its essence, but the potentiality of the republic dreams is not at rest. It is progressing and aspiring to achieve all the possible good for its citizens and also facing some new challenges, which are required to be taken very seriously. To deduce the theme from ‘abstract generality’ to ‘concrete generality’ (Hegel), it is required to revisit the preamble of Indian Constitution to see if constitutional dreams, or in contemporary time popularly known as constitutional morality is being translated into practices, or is it still flourishing as ideals? How to see the Constitution in a quantum world, whereas ‘credulity of metanarratives’ (Lyotard) are ‘under erasure’ (Heidegger)? What ideals need to be reinvented; which principle ought to be instilled? Reflectivity, evaluation, and revaluation, the whole process must go on. In the age of robotic intelligence, how to raise these ethical questions is really an onerous task. On the completion of the seventy years of Indian Republic can we say with certainty that India has achieved so much as to uplift its citizens from the daily cries of basic needs? What role a governor or governed may play to ensure emancipatory governance? These ethical questions are required to be reframed and re-analysed. It seems, we are susceptible to the zeal of answering many a triviality, but where is a single authentic question to raise? A ‘post-question’ human colony seems to be mimetic and mechanical one. Only invention of authentic questions may redeem the authenticity and meaning of the republic whose future is awaiting for true insights.
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