Instinct and intuition of Kocheril Raman Narayanan and Gopalkrishna Gandhi

The grand son of M.K Ganshi Gopalkrishna Gandhi writes in today’s HT:

“An individual can resolve the conflict between one right path and another through his or her instincts. But what about a State? Does the State have instincts that help it choose one of the two, or does it rely on objective reasoning alone?

In a totalitarian regime, the supremo’s instinct decides everything. But to the extent that a democracy elects thinking, feeling individuals to office, its leadership cannot but use both intelligence and instinct, intellection and intuition.

In India’s integrated acoustics three major forms of utterance can be segregated: the grammar of authority (sarkar/siyasat), the prose of faith-systems (dharma/mazhab) and the free verse of human instincts of the finer kind (svabhav/jazba). The first two, the grammar and the prose, are strong baritones. The ‘free verse’ of human instincts illustrated powerfully in Sufi compositions and in the writings of Kabir and Surdas, is soft. This is not just because it is un-pedestalled and unamplified but because it is plural, like a choir’s. The framers of our Constitution were aware of the importance, as well as the fragility, of this voice, the ‘inner voice’ of India. The preamble to our Constitution, beautifully rendered in Hindi as ‘Uddeshika’, is the seat of that voice.”