Speakers at sociopolitical seminars almost everywhere in the world cringe and fret when someone talks of the moral voice of humanity or of the nation. Talk of 'concern', but don't invoke 'morality', said a wise, secular elder to me after the seminar. For him Jagmohan was what Time magazine defined in a cover story several years ago as "a busybody humorlessly imposing on others arbitrary (meaning his own) standards of behavior, health and thought".

There is perhaps a plausible explanation for this. All of us see immorality not in ourselves and those near and dear to us but in everybody else everywhere. And moral outrage is often caused by personal affront. When hurt, we feel, like the lady officer who was slapped in the back by the state police chief, "if this could happen to ME, how can any woman be safe". We internalize the hurt but socialize the injury, and we seek socio-legal revenge. In a transient way, the ME in us seeks a larger identity, an identity that has always been there, lying dormant because we have no use for group identity until we get affected or hurt in our individual identity.

When Indians talk of moral reform, they are almost always invoking religion and being 'asociological'. They believe that the problem is one of individual conscience. If the young could be taught to distinguish right from wrong by parents, at school and college, if scriptural messages could reach them again, our moral and social order would become fine. They are right, but only partially. They do emphasize a major component of the moral equation: the inner voice.

In the process, however, most of the spiritualists, in conflicting collusion with secularists, have completely eliminated the vital role of society and the community in strengthening the individual's moral commitments. Together, religion and secularism have hijacked the vast platform available to the people to pursue moral reform and conduct social debate. And the vital question, 'who is a moral person?' remains buried under the debris of the social edifice demolished by the communalist-secularist divide.

The point of the tale is that the rabbit will not try to rationalize its impulses but humans always will. The moral voice of any society or community addresses itself to resolve the eternal conflict between our impulses and judgments. In making our moral choices we are influenced by the approbation or censure of others, especially of those with whom we are closely related. This collective moral voice, if spoken in clear terms and in unison, will shape our inner judgments and help raise the moral level of all members of a society. Afflicted with myopia, reticence or lack of interest, the voice is muted or becomes extinct. This is what has happened to all human society in this era and to India in particular.

When society or the immediate community loses its moral voice, the State becomes unaccountable to the people. There are, of course, too many individual voices of morality but not a collective moral voice. While those representing the State have the force of law behind them, the individuals affected by that have no countervailing force. A million 'MEs' can be tamed by a few militants or hoodlums or policemen because these million 'MEs' cannot convert themselves into one 'US'.

The weakness of the moral voice is precisely that it lacks the force to compel but has only the duty to urge us, advise us and guide us. Ultimately, the individual is free to follow his or her own impulse or judgment whatever friends, lovers, teachers might say. The strength of the moral voice is that it does not seek conformism but offers a shared value and destiny. It is almost always the voice of the meek majority. In our times no one represented the authority of this voice so forcefully as Mahatma Gandhi; and nothing repudiated it so thoroughly as India has since Gandhi.