Does Baba Ramdev know better than Babasaheb

The crucial question before all of us today is whether we think that #Baba_Ramdev knows better than the chief architect of the Constitution of India, Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar.

Initially the present Union Government seems to have thought so, by openly encouraging and embracing a man, whose actions have been questioned by people of late, before being reprimanded by the ruling party.

Whether the Baba is himself a tax evader or a peddler of snake oil or a land grabber is better left to authorities and are not a subject of this post.  What should concern us all is that the Baba’s actions and action plan make him sound like an Usurper.

While some of his demands sound reasonable, many of the action plan are either woolly-headed or downright unconstitutional.  While

• recovery of black money stashed abroad,
• declaring such black money as ‘national assets’,
• revocation or ‘correction’ of Land Acquisition Law to protect farmers, and
• restricting banks that operate from known tax-havens,

all sound reasonable and correct; 

The idea of,

• abolishing 500 and 1000 Rupee currency,
• drastic upward revision of Minimum Support Price for food grains,
• a national level uniform wage scale for labourers, and
• making compulsory filing of Income Tax returns for every citizen,

are patently hare-brained ideas at best;

The point that,

• income-tax declarations (sought to be made mandatory) are to be public information,

is at the very least an assault on privacy and individual rights.

The rest of the ideas,

• capital punishment for bribe taking or official corruption,
• charging Indians stashing money abroad with sedition,
• direct election of the Prime Minister by popular vote,
• replacing existing system of governance, administration, education, and everything else with a ‘swadeshi’ model, and
• promoting Hindi (later substituted with ‘regional languages’) at the expense of English (especially in Medical, Engineering and Technical education)

are downright unconstitutional and directly strike against the vision of Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar and the founding fathers who comprised the constituent assembly under his leadership.

Let us put the ideas in perspective:

• Punishment should be in proportion to the Crime is the foundation of modern English Common Law and to suggest that bribe takers should be ‘killed’ or tax evaders charged with ‘treason’ is ultra-vires in any judicial system - not only English Common law.
• When the world is becoming more and more flatter, in terms of knowledge and competition, chiefly through technology and understanding of science, one would have thought our present leaders and pretenders would have realised and insist that the Indian children learn additional world languages, apart from English. 
• Apart from (whichever) the mother tongue, English insist on learning (at least) two more foreign languages - preferably one European and one Eastern, should be commonsense.  Imagine the advantage the future generation of Indians will possess, if they’re well versed in both Spanish and Chinese and competing with Chinese in Latin America?
  • Yet, a pretender is advocating otherwise - he says let go of even English.  Pathetic!
  • :-(
  • This idea itself may be unconstitutional, because doesn’t a student have the right to be educated in the language, she prefers?  And college students are not children wearing blinkers that they would not see the callousness of Baba’s idea.
• Last, replacing the existing system is what everyone wants - from the principal opposition party (who would want a rule by the majority, without a thought to the right of the minorities), the communists, the Kashmiri terror groups (and earlier the Khalistani terror groups) and the Maoists.  The only point of difference is which system to adopt instead of the present proven system -
  • communist,
  • maoist,
  • islamic talibanic or
  • swadeshi.  Go choose.
• Direct election of the Prime Minister by popular vote is again going directly against the wishes and vision of our founding fathers.  If they had thought that was the right model, they would have advocated it, not the present model of a Parliamentary election of the PM.

Before we jump into the band wagon of such, I feel that people should take a step back and ask a few simple questions.

• Are today’s leaders, especially the present advocate (not only Baba Ramdev, but anyone), as good, as unselfish, as learned and as visionary as the 550 odd people who comprised the Constituent Assembly?  If not, why should we endorse these upstarts and give up on those great men and women?
• Do today’s leaders, think for the present or do they have foresight and vision?  If they are incapable of thinking and caring for our future, why should we endorse them and give up on the founding fathers?

Time to put the thinking cap on!

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