Gandhian Democracy: Ignored by the Constitutionalists of India

“The condition of England at present is pitiable. I pray to God that India may never be in that plight. That which you consider to be the Mother of Parliaments is like a sterile woman and a prostitute. Both these are harsh terms, but exactly fit the case.” —Gandhiji

The cruel buffooneries of the English Parliament started in the term of King Henry VIII (1509-47) who inaugurated Reformation in England through his immoral life. He decided to divorce his wife, Catherine Aragon, to marry Anne Boleyn. Henry and Catherine had a daughter, Princess Mary. With Elizabeth Blount he had an illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy, whom he turned into the Duke of Richmount in 1525. He had another illegitimate child with Mary Boleyn, sister of Anne Boleyn. Henry requested the Pope to solemnise his divorce from Catherine and union with Anne. The Pope refused. The ugly Parliament was told that if Henry would marry Anne, he would be excommunicated by the Pope. As a lackey of the King, it passed an Act in 1532 making the King the final judge of all cases. Retorting the papacy, that Act also declared that the King is not responsible to any sublunary power.

In pursuance of the Act, Henry married Anne Boleyn and in 1533 she gave him Elizabeth. Then, the bigoted Parliament passed the Act of supremacy in 1534 and made the King the head of the Church of England. It refused the papal authority and officially declared the Reformation. But John Fischer, the Bishop of Rochester, did not accept the religious supremacy of the King and for that offence he was executed.

In 1536, Henry executed Anne Boleyn and her brother, Lord Rochford, for incest. Thereafter that King of erotomania married Jane Saymour, Anne Cleve, Catherine Howard and Catherine Parr. He did all divorces and marriages like a prime bull because he had been made the head of the Anglican Church by the sluttish Parliament. He executed his wives, Annie Boleyn and Catherine Howard, being the Supreme Judge of England made by Parliament. In all those cases, the Parliament was acting like a spatula of the King.

In 1553 Mary, the daughter Henry VIII with Catherine Aragon, became the Queen. Her father became a Protestant to divorce her Catholic mother and on that reason Mary became a roaring Catholic. In 1554, the moonstruck Parliament swept away all enactments made by it against the papacy in the interest of the fornicating King and revived heresy-burning laws against the Protestants declaring parliamentary fanaticism. In order to establish the rule of law in parlia-mentary democracy, Hug Latimer, a preacher, Nicholas Ridley, the Bishop of Rochester, and Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of London, were burnt alive with hundreds of ordinary men and women and praised the Lord of Mercy. In 1554 Queen Mary married Prince Philip of Catholic Spain who became King there in 1556. Mary died in 1559.

Following her, Elizabeth, the illegitimate daughter of Henry VIII with Anne Boleyn, became the Queen. She was proclaimed by Pope Pills V: the pretended Queen of England, the servant of wickedness, to have incurred the sentence of excommunication and to be cut off from the body of Christ. Since Henry implanted Reformation in England to get his fornication with Anne Boleyn sanctified, their daughter Elizabeth became a diabolic Protestant diametrically opposed to the Catholicism of Queen Mary. Soon after her coronation, the devilish Parliament quashed all laws made by it in the interest of Queen Mary and drove the laws back to the period of Henry VIII.

The haughty Crusades, calamitous Black Death and blood-thirsty Reformation senselessly annihilating the work force resulted in nationalised pauperism of England. Poverty and hunger made the people law-makers, law-breakers, prosecutors, judges and executioners on street. For the maintenance of law and order, the criminal Parliament made laws to whip and expose vagabonds in the stock as well as to award capital punishment to pickpockets. In 1571, the deranged Parliament made laws to award capital punishment to those who try to proselytise others to Catholicism. This resulted in mass execution of Catholic priests and laities.
In the meantime, against Catholicism in France, John Calvin (1509-64) established Calvinism that meant something austere, strict, severe or obstinate. Application of Calvinism in England was Puritanism, intended to purge away all Catholic traces. For pleasing the opiated Puritans and bringing them under control, Elizabeth used Parliament as a purgative-like cathartic castor oil. In 1593 it stipulated that all those who would not attend the service of the Anglican Church would go into execution or exile and the law was enforced blindly. Here, the state and fanaticism became a single unit generating an ecclesiastical polity and the theological Parliament became the production centre of laws for hierocracy.

Elizabeth, who died unmarried, is called the Virgin Queen and Virginia in America is named to honour her. But she was not a virgin really. She was in love with Prince Philip, the husband of Queen Mary, her half-sister. Philip was a Catholic and after the death of Mary, Elizabeth could not marry him due to religious secta-rianism engendering parliamentary brutality. When the Armada was taking place between Spain and England for twenty years and murdering millions of fanatic soldiers on both sides, the King and Queen of both countries were in deep love. But fearing Parliament, Elizabeth died sterile.

After Elizabeth, James I became the King in 1603. He was a Catholic and the son of Mary, the Queen of Scots, the legitimate successor of the throne, who had been executed by the illegitimate Queen Elizabeth under Catholic slaughter Acts made by Parliament. Within her 44-year regime of terror, Elizabeth made the Parliament apostatise from Catholicism and it became Protestant and puritanic. The struggle between the Catholic King and Puritan Parliament, started therefrom, is sanctimoniously called ‘Civil War’. Fearing murder by the Puritans, James always wore padded clothes. In 1628, the House of Commons, which was not elected by the common people but represented landlords and tycoons, presented “The Petition of Rights” to the King prohibiting him from accepting gifts or loans without their consent. The King, one among the negligible Catholics beleaguered by the brutal majority of Puritans, signed the Petition of Rights like King John signed the Magna Carta as threatened by the mighty feudal lords.

In 1687, another Catholic King, James II, suspended all penal laws against the Catholics. In the meantime the second wife of James II, Mary Modena, gave birth to a son. Quite early, his elder daughter Mary was married to William of Orange who was a Protestant and by virtue of it she became Protestant. After James, Protestant succession was assured in England. But the neo-natal baby, who would be Catholic on growing up, subverted all the sweet dreams of the Protestants and Puritans. For checking the continuance of Catholic rule, Protestant Bishops and Puritan leaders in Parliament conducted a criminal conspiracy of treason and invited William of Orange to come over to London with armed forces to boot out James. In 1688 the Protestant wind blew William down to the English Channel. On the shore the Protestant Army mutinying against the King was waiting. Hearing the news, James tried to abscond into Catholic France, but Protestant fishermen netted him back. However, he was allowed a second successful flight.

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THE Protestant Parliament allotted William and Mary the throne in common as their bedroom coat. Even though a father was evicted by a daughter and husband, Englishmen called it the Glorious Revolution. In fact it was a kitchen brawl only. In 1689 the House of Commons, a body of rich Puritans, prepared a list of demands called ‘The Bill of Rights’ and submitted to William and Mary which they approved. The first item in the Bill was to revive all penal laws against Catholics that was quashed by James II. The second was to prohibit the Catholics from the English throne forever. The third one was to allow freedom of speech in Parliament because all human rights of the Catholics had been amputated to assure that none among them would enter Parliament. After William and Mary, Anne, the younger daughter of James II, became the Queen. She had no children. In that circumstance the Puritan capeos in London found that on the death of Anne, Edward James, the Catholic son of James II, roaming about on the streets of Paris, would be the King in due course with the aid of Catholic countries like France and Spain; in order to avoid it they found out a Sophia, the wife of a German Prince, the elector of Hanover and a Protestant. The Parliament in 1701 passed The Act of Settlement deciding that on Anne’s death, the English throne was to pass on to Protestant Sophia and her descendants. It reiterated the Magna Carta by stating that the King had no power to dismiss Judges. Thus four reactionary, fanatic and anti-people instruments, namely, the Magna Carta, Petition of Rights, Bill of Rights and Act of Settlement, became the written documents for the unwritten Constitution of Britain and its parliamentary democracy.

The Puritan Parliament was the killer of Charles (1625-49), the son of James I; the crime done by him was that he married a Catholic woman against the decision of Parliament. It may be remembered that Queen Elizabeth resisted an open marriage to avoid the same. With a view to book Charles, the Commons passed a Militia Bill and appointed a dehumanised Puritan member, Oliver Cromwell, as the Commander-in-Chief of that Army. Thereafter in 1648 he arrested Charles for treason, even though they had a legal theory, still valid, that the King can do no wrong. One hundred and fifty Puritan Commons headed by John Bradshaw, a stupid lawyer, conducted a lampoon-trial and awarded capital punishment. Before execution, they made a last attempt through Bishop Juxon to make Charles a religious turncoat; but he refused the offer to proselytise and save his life.
As generally believed, all members of the House of Lords are gentlemen or intellectuals. This is not correct. Any stupid can be a member in the House of Lords provided he is the eldest son of the eldest son in a chain going back to an ancestor who was a feudal lord. On many occasions they had struggled with the House of Commons. In 1776 Major John Cartwright evaluated the House of Commons in a pamphlet: Indeed, the House of Commons is filled with idle schoolboys, insignificant coxcombs, led-captains and toad-eaters, profligates, gamblers, bankrupts, beggars, contractors, commissaries, public plunderers, ministerial dependants, hirelings, and wretches, that would sell their country or deny their God for a guinea.

Now in this 21st century, representatives of the people in all elected bodies in India from top to bottom are more or less equal to those in the English Commons. Immorality, inefficiency, treason, corruption and such other social-political morbidities gnawing in India are unavoidable siblings of the Westminster-style of democracy imposed by the British devotees over the people against the warnings of Gandhiji. Even then history has proved their Parliament is a sterile prostitute. Neo-Gandhians, experts in hi-tech fasting, may realise that Lokpal or something bigger than it cannot save the county unless the alien system of democracy and Constitution is dismantled and reconstituted in the nation under Gandhian democracy.

On the eve of his demise Gandhiji drafted the democratic Constitution of India, his last will and testament, over the substratum of the cultural heritage of this nation which is the motherland of secularism in the world. He wrote: After converting the Indian National Congress into a Loksevak Sangh, at the grassroot level of the country, five adult men and five adult women, must associate to form a basic panchayat. Such panchayats must join together to form a working group under an elected leader at first. Such fifty leaders, representing hundred panchayats, are to elect a leader under whom they are to work. On the third stage, leaders at the second level may elect a leader from among them. Gandhiji stopped therewith as he was not a seer to foresee his death on the next day. After accepting what he wrote, the nation had to complete his will by making provisions to elect State and Central Assemblies as its continuation in pyramidal form. Gandhiji formulated his ideas on democracy from his erudition on ancient Indian administration, especially the Nair governance in Kerala, when Westerners were hunters, dog-breeders or unruly mobs who were unable to say one minus one is equal to zero until the fifteenth century. Here, in the village or hamlet level, the eldest male member of each Nair home associated to discuss and decide matters of common interest. Representatives of many such villages decided matters for a wider area, say, a district. Finally, representatives of all such district assemblies met together on State level whenever necessary and these bodies corrected even the tyrannical decisions of Kings.

Now, elections in India are a high-handed gambling exercise, involving the wager of crores anticipating multi-crores. Candidates and parties deputing them garner that huge capital from usurers, bootleggers, drug-runners, sex-racketeers, underworld plutocrats and all such other elements hoarding criminal money. In return, those getting power are bound to protect their financiers by all heinous means. It is the primary stage of corruption in parliamentary democracy. Stocking money for future while in power is secondary. Moreover, the political Hades are promoting religious zealots, linguistic bigots, communal wrestlers and provincial partisans like their counterparts in parliamentary Britian. The fake intellectuals who constituted free India, imposing British parliamentary democracy and Anglo-American Constitution, rejected the Gandhian Constitution wilfully.