Friday, February 8, 2013

An Open Letter To The President of India

In one of our previous posts (see here) we proposed a declaration by Hindus, as it were. In this post we write an open letter to the president of India. This too may be considered a draft version. Those who are better versed in legal terms and are conversant with writing using legal language might do a better job and improve this draft.

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Dear Mr. President,

We are a group of frustrated human beings seeking cheap publicity.

Before you and/or those who are in agreement and/or in collusion with you allege about us that these guys are frustrated humans who are seeking cheap publicity, we emphasize that notwithstanding the state of our being, nor the nature of our motivation, we must require no one's permission to be in a functional mode of Responsible Liberty.

However, we find that the state of which you are the President and the Constitution of which you are the Custodian seem to implicitly claim that they have the moral authority to constrain our freedoms beyond any explicitly mutually agreed notions or natural notions of Responsible Liberty.

Any document, however well conceived and however well intended, does not obtain any legitimacy to exercise any control over the conduct of peoples' lives merely because the document contains phrases like "we the people" and "give ourselves this constitution", interspersed with phrases indicating however high sounding goals.

There is no gainsaying the fact that in that moment of history when "those people gave themselves" the constitution, going by the then existing poor literacy rate, except for a minuscule fraction of the then population, few could have ascertained if they got what they sought, or whether they even sought whatever they got.

Also, be that as it may, the we-the-people then had no right to pledge any commitment on behalf of us, the we-the-people now.

Any document, the contents of which are not, in some sense, self evident, objectively demonstrable, subjectively verifiable, or voluntarily explicitly consented can not be binding except through the exercise of unethical coercion.

Given the fact that the freedom to disagree to give consent to the document is absent, it is inconceivable to regard the said coercion as anything other than enforcing slavery, and the adjectival term constitutional does not grant any legitimacy to the imposition of Constitutional Slavery.

While we, as a group, do have at the very least, nebulous views on what we would prefer to term a Meta-Constitution, and Proto-State, we are free from the folly of intending to coerce our views on the unwilling. Further, notwithstanding the nebulous nature of our views, we are open to the method of debate, voluntary and free exchange of ideas and opinions, and most importantly the freedom to disagree as well as the freedom to disassociate.

However, your state and its Constitution remain culpable of the charge: Why such presumptuousness - enforcing constitutional slavery - should not be considered as an act of aggression against the people.

The onus of proof is on you.

In particular, you need to establish that the constitution (the intended content of the constitution) is, in some reasonable sense, one or many of 

(a) Self-Evident,

(b) Objectively Demonstrable,

(c) Subjectively Verifiable,

(d) Voluntarily Explicitly Consented.

Failing which, you need to explain why enforcing constitutional slavery not be considered an act of aggression.

Let the People be the Court, the Lawyers, as well as the Judge: as individuals or groups for themselves.

Sincerely,

Some among the We-the-people now.