Leslie Johns 00:00

Hello, everyone, and welcome to today's Burkle book talk. Before we get started, just a few quick announcements. First, audio and video recordings are being made that you can access later as video or podcasts. They'll be available on the Burkle Center website as well as through other formats, including YouTube, and other formats. However, the audience cannot be seen or heard, only me and today's guests will actually be recorded. As you listen to today's talk, please feel free to submit your questions for today's guests using the Q&A button which is at the bottom of your screen. Please be sure to submit brief and clear questions so that I can quickly read them and convey them back to our guests. So today's guest author is Tejas Parasher, who's an assistant professor of political science and Global Studies at UCLA. Previously, he was a Junior Research Fellow in Political Thought and Intellectual History at the University of Cambridge in England. He got his PhD from the University of Chicago and 2019. So he's a relatively young scholar. And he's here to talk to us about his first book, which is called Radical Democracy in Modern Indian Political Thought. So it's a really exciting new book. And so I'm going to go ahead and ask Tejas to go ahead and join me today. Tejas, welcome. Thanks so much for joining us.

Tejas Parasher 01:36

Thank you so much. Let's see, thanks for that kind introduction. It's a real pleasure to be here. Lovely to speak to everyone all, but virtually. And I also before beginning, just want to thank Alexandra and then all the staff at the Burkle Center for helping with all the logistics of this talk. It's been a real pleasure working with everyone. Now, as Leslie mentioned, in her introduction, the book that I'm going to be speaking about today is titled "Radical Democracy in Modern Indian Political Thought". And really, the book as a whole is a response to one overall animating issue or problem. That's how I began the book. And that's how, as I've sort of thought about what it is that the book is really contributing that I've really kind of honed in on this one overall issue. And this is a sense that I've had for a few years now that the story we tell about the end of empire in the 20th century, is fundamentally incomplete. Now, as many of you might know, over an approximately 25 year period, from the late 1940s, to the early 1970s, the overseas territories of the British, the French, the Dutch, and as well as a number of other overseas European empires and European powers collapsed, right, and these were replaced by new nation states. And, in a sense, the this moment, which is called the moment of decolonization gave us the map that we have today. And my issue, the issue that this book is responding to is a sense that I had that the way we understand this transition, this transition from what the political scientists Rupert Emerson, in 1960, described as the transition from Empire to nation, this transition from one kind of political community to another doesn't tell the whole story, right, that it's been missing some crucial pieces. And what the book is trying to do is really both to get a sense, give readers a sense of what it is that current narratives about the end of empire missing, and tries to give us a more complete and I think, a more historically accurate narrative. So let me just illustrate this with a brief anecdote before I get into the content and the overall argument of the book. So on the 17th of February of 1949, an Indian thinker and political activist named Manabendra Nath Roy, or M. N. Roy, was a somewhat cantankerous former Marxist, gave a speech warning of the dangerous consequences of modern democratic thought and practice. This was the topic of his speech. In this speech, Roy argued that, on one hand, the rise of democracy as a legitimate form of government in modern Europe, so from the 17th century, from England in the 17th century through to the French Revolution and then into the 19th century, that this period, which had witnessed the rise of democracy as a legitimate form of government had affirmed two principles: individual freedom on one hand and popular sovereignty on the other. So Roy thought this was a very valuable thing that with the rise of demo Ah cracy, there was now a greater respect for the individual citizen. And there was a greater respect for some category called 'the people' as the source of authorization for law and government. But on the other hand, Roy continued his speech and lamented that the record of democracy in the 19th and 20th centuries was, as he put it, certainly not too bright. And Roy argued that the political crises occasioned by the dictatorships of in Western Europe, in the 1930s and 1940s, had at least partly been caused by what he called the discrepancy that existed between democratic theory and democratic practice. And right closed his speech by insisting that, quote, a country like India, which after a long period of struggle for political independence, has attained a stage when it can now adopt a political system and a political theory of its own choice, that such a country should not straightforwardly embrace modern democracy, if modern democracy meant the democracy of 20th century, Western Europe, and the United States. So this speech was given in February of 1949. And this date is very important, because this is a period when the formal end of the British Empire first in South Asia and then in Southeast Asia, in across large parts of Africa, and in the Caribbean, when the formal end of this British Empire had either begun happening already, or was on the immediate horizon. Exactly two and a half years before Roy's speech, a Constituent Assembly had been elected, indirectly elected, to convene in New Delhi to draft a post-imperial constitution for the country that would become India, and the country that is today, India. And the Constituent Assembly was still deliberate when Roy gave his speech in February of 1949. And the speech in fact, was somewhat indirectly addressed to members of that assembly. So what do we make of Roy's apprehension about democratization on the eve of colonial independence? This is a kind of interpretive puzzle for us, was he simply a kind of authoritarian anti-democrat? Was he simply saying that India, democracy is not suited for Asian societies and for a country like India and what India should adopt is a kind of Leninst dictatorship? Not really. Given that he delivered his speech to members of a group that called itself the Radical Democratic Party. And that one of the reasons that Roy had abandoned Marxism in the 1940s had been because of his criticism and his dissatisfaction with both the Leninist and the Stalinist forms of dictatorship in the Soviet Union. So Roy's speech really poses a kind of puzzle. How do we make sense of the fact that even as a Constituent Assembly is deliberating and debating how one constructs a democracy in a newly independent country or a country is soon about to become independent, that even as that process is happening, a thinker is being very, very critical of democracy itself? And this book project, this book manuscript really began to take shape, as I was doing archival work in Delhi, first of all, and then at the India Office Records in London, as I was doing archival work on Indian constitutional thought of the 1930s and 40s, and as I explored the writings of this period, one of the things I began to realize, is just how widely shared Roy's critique of modern democracy had, in fact, been during these two decades, right. So this was quite unexpected for me, I'd gone in, sort of intending to, to work on a project on theories of democracy in the transition to independence in India. And I realized, actually, more interesting than theories of democracy were the critiques of modern democracy. Right. And I was really surprised by how widespread these critiques were. It wasn't just that Roy was not alone in his critique, right, that he was not, in fact, an outlier, but that he seemed to be representative of a much larger and quite vibrant tradition of political thought or political discourse, a tradition which I realized had been almost entirely ignored in the historiography. And the conceptual language of this tradition, namely the exact ideas it was arguing against and the exact ideas it was proposing as alternatives. And I'll go into that conceptual language more in a second. This conceptual language felt very difficult to reconcile with how historians and political scientists and legal scholars were understanding anti-colonial political and constitutional thought of the mid 20th century, namely how people were understanding that transition from empire to nation. Simply put, the discourse of political self-government, in India, and in other countries, which gained national independence from Imperial rule in the 1940s and 1950s, has long been equated with the discourse of electoral representative democracy, usually in its parliamentary variant. And what I mean by this is this idea of political self-government as a principle, which could be used to criticize imperial rule, or the rule of one community over another, the meaning of political self-government has usually been equated with representative government. Right. So within the history of Indian political thought, for instance, so if we focus on one case for now, democracy, as it was understood by the Republic's founders, has been taken to be synonymous with electoral democracy since at least the 1960s. Indeed, one of the variables that's often used to explain the relative stability of India's parliamentary democracy over the last 75 years, is that there is a strong commitment to parliamentary government, to multiparty competition, and to universal adult suffrage within the nationalist movement. Right. So one of the long standing puzzles in democratic studies, as many of you I'm sure will know has been 'why is it that India's democracy succeeded, has succeeded, in the face of socio-economic inequality?' and so on. And one of the reasons given is that the nationalist movement was itself deeply committed to democracy. So there was a kind of normative commitment to the electoral system that guided the foundation of India as an independent country. That's been a fairly standard narrative. This was certainly true. I mean, you can find this narrative in a, a book, titled "The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation" from 1966, which was one of the first studies of this question of 'why is it that India's democracy has succeeded?' And it's still probably the seminal work on the Indian founding. And what the book argued is that a bicameral elected legislature broadly on the British model was the key institutional element of Indian nationalist thought and particularly Indian nationalist thought on self government through the 1940s. Right. So the book argues that it's not surprising that India both adopted the democratic framework and has been able to sustain that democratic framework. It's because the nationalist movement through the 1940s was committed to a form of electoral democracy, right. And many recent political theorists and legal theorists who write on the Indian founding also make this argument or version of this argument, that the nationalist commitment to parliamentary government signified a commitment to popular sovereignty to what we might call the rule of the demands, the rule of the people, as a founding principle of a post-colonial Republic. And, again, this kind of ideological consensus around the value of parliamentary government or the value of parliamentaries, is often used to explain why opposing political factions in India have still worked within the broad structure of multiparty electoral government. Right. And also why the country has not experienced any extended periods of military rule, for instance, right. The reasoning given is this ideological consensus that existed amongst various factions of the National Movement around the normative value of parliamentary multi-party government. And I use the Indian case here, but certainly the historiography of Indian thought and the transition from empire to nation in the case of British India is not unique in making this kind of argument; not unique in its in what we might call its parliamentary focus. As the historian Arjun Kumar Singam has argued and works on on the legal aspects of the end of empire. Arjun Kumar Singam argues that the link between democratic self-rule and the end of empire is usually seen through the lens of electoral democracy, right. So, the circulation what this means is that the circulation of Democratic or Republican constitutions within many countries which gained independence in the 1940s and 1950s, is seen as the sign of a kind of transnational turn or transnational adoption of parliamentary government great. So, self-government in and against empire is seen to entail in a turn towards electoral parliamentary government, right. So for instance, in the case of French West Africa, the demand for political rights and self rule is usually seen or usually interpreted in terms of securing political representation for colonial structures, either within the French National Assembly or within regional assemblies. Right. So I think it's fair to say that electoral government, electoral government and electoral representation has been seen as the primary mechanism through which anti-colonial nationalists sought to move away from empire. Right. That the discourse of self-government as a principle that was opposed to imperial rule was seen institutionally through the form of electoral representation. And the puzzle that I want to pose at the beginning here is that a someone like M. N. Roy just does not fit into this narrative. Right. If we say that anti-colonial nationalism was attached to this form of electoral representation, then what do we make of the warning that Roy was giving in 1949, about introducing electoral democracy into an independent India? And the the book really grew out of a frustration that I was hoping that this the tradition that Roy represented, was just seemed to be at odds with how scholars social scientists were, were understanding the content of anti-colonial nationalist thought. And so the goal of the book as a whole is to use thinkers like Roy, to highlight the limitations of what I call the 'parliamentary reading' or the 'electoral reading' anti-colonial political thought and anti-colonial nationalist thought. I argue that broadly that a kind of historiographical or an interpretive fidelity to electoral systems of government to electoral systems of representation has led historians, constitutional lawyers, and political scientists to overlook other kinds of democratic projects and indeed, more radical democratic alternatives, which existed throughout the first half of the 20th century. So there's a kind of silencing of alternatives that happens when we follow social scientists and political scientists in assuming a general overall consensus around the value of electoral government with an anti-colonial nationalist, both in South Asia but also elsewhere, in other imperial contexts. And what the book is really trying to do is to recover a tradition recover a tradition that has been lost because of that, this kind of historiographical blind spot, right. And to illustrate this alternative tradition, what I want to do today is to turn very briefly to a pamphlet that was published from the north Indian city of Allahabad in January of 1946. And I want to talk about this pamphlet, because I think it really illustrates the kind of tradition that I'm talking about here. And the kind of tradition that is missed, when we work within dominance, the currently dominant forms, frameworks of constitutional history and of the history of anti-colonial thought. So this is a pamphlet from 1946 titled, "Gandhian Constitution for a Free India". The author of this pamphlet was someone named Shriman Narayan Agarwal, or Shriman Narayan. And this pamphlet is the subject of one of the chapters in the book. So Narayan himself was an academic, and he was trained in economics and in philosophy. And, very importantly, from from the 1930s on what he became was one of Mahatma Gandhi's or MK Gandhi's closest acolytes. So he was the dean of an economics college, which Gandhi helped set up in the early 1940s. And much of his writing in the early 1940s, was devoted to explicating the economic and political aspects of Gandhi's thought to a popular audience. So he saw himself as, for lack of a better term, Gandhi's political scientist, or Gandhi's economist. Ghani himself referred to Narayen as the person who was trying to translate his philosophy into the language of modern political science. This is Gandhi's own phrase. So he recognized that his ideas that Gandhi's kind of somewhat idiosyncratic ideas sometimes about non-violence, about duty and so on, needed to be framed in more social scientific terms for them to be taken seriously as theories of political and economic organization, right. And Gandhi thought that Shriman Narayan was the person who was doing this kind of translation. So the text that I'm interested in in the book, the text I'm going to talk about today was titled "Gandhian Constitution", and it was by far Narayan's most sophisticated work. So this pamphlet was published, as I said, in January of 1946, a few months after the end of the Second World War, when the prospect of Indian independence from the British Empire was now on the horizon in a way, to an extent that it had not been before in previous years, and certainly in previous decades. So Narayen had his eyes trained on the Constituent Assembly, which would soon be elected to formulate the country's post-imperial constitution. Gandhi, who wrote an introductory foreword to the pamphlet, rightly identified in Narayen's text as what he called 'a contribution to the many attempts at presenting India with constitutions in the early and mid 1940s'. So, this text itself is part of a genre of writing that you can find in this period, that is trying to imagine what an independent India would look like, right? And Shriman Narayan text is attempting to think about what an India founded on Gandhian principles would look like constitutionally, right. And the pamphlet contained two sections. First of all, there was a kind of wide ranging essay at the outset, when Narayan outlined the stakes of his project. And this was followed by a complete draft constitution, then the opening essay is quite fascinating because it gives us a window into the kind of thinking that I think is illustrative or indicative of the tradition that I'm talking about here, this radical democratic tradition. So in the opening essay, nine around first asserted in quite vehement tones, which spoke to a kind of urgency, a sense of urgency, that democracy in the mid 1940s, was now as you put it at a crossroads. The interwar period had revealed the fragility of parliamentary constitutions in Russia, in Germany, in Italy, and in Britain. Such constitutions could clearly devolve into elite dominated plutocracies and even into outright dictatorships. So you can see the link with M. N. Roy here, right, you can see it's a similar kind of language. There's this fear that democracy as it has existed in through the first half of the 20th century, in Western Europe, and not just in Western Europe, but Russia is another obviously important case, that such these kinds of parliamentary democracies can easily collapse into dictatorships because that is what they see as having happened through the 1930s and 1940s. So first of all, what's what's the first thing that strikes one, when you read an essay like this is just how the record of democracy was seen as something to be fearful of right? The democracy is not an unqualified good for someone writing in the mid 1940s, at least democracy as it has existed in, say, Weimar Germany or in pre-revolutionary Russia. So the anti-democratic dangers of representative democracy for Narayan I mean, that this was his kind of diagnosis of the problem. The problem for him lay in economic factors. So the anti-democratic dangers of representative democracy derived from fundamentally economic factors. Narayan identified what he called "acquisitive society", as the root cause of our political malaise So he described a quote, inherent contradiction between capitalism on one hand and democracy on the other. Since the motive to production in mass capitalism, or the form of capitalism that existed in 20th century industrialized states was put profit for the owner of in the instruments of production, then this was a mode of economic production, which created incentives for private individuals to "use the authority of the state to increase the material well being at their disposal". And so ultimately, he said, the unhealthy power of money in modern democracies if left unchecked, led to democracy itself, becoming the "handmaiden of capitalism", an oligarchic namely an oligarchic system of rule in which the moneyed class directly or indirectly sought to control the legislature. Right. And so this was his argument for how a parliamentary system of government when it was simply transposed onto a kind of olika archaic economic arrangement of industrial capitalism would invariably transform into a kind of plutocracy. And Shriman Narayan was very concerned that representative electoral democracy, as well as forms of state-led capitalism, were being proposed as models, first of all, as models of Post War reconstruction in Western Europe, that was his first concern that post war reconstruction in Western Europe was simply turning back to the kind of democracy that had already failed in the early 20th century, and that it was combining this democracy with a kind of economic system, which he also thought would lend itself to oligarchic systems of power. And he and he warned that such systems would revert back into the cycles of plutocratic rule and political violence that had characterized the 1920s and 1930s. So there's a fear that he has in the essay about what is being proposed for Europe, Western Europe after the war in 1946. But then closer to home. Narayan's opening essay criticized what he saw as the dominant view within Indian nationalist circles, and particularly the dominant view held by the Indian National Congress, which was the main anti-colonial political organization and political party at the time. And this be, according to him was unquestioningly advocating industrial capitalism state led industrial capitalism and electoral democracy as the goals of post colonial state building. Right. So so he's already in the essay concerned that a system that has shown itself as particularly vulnerable to oligarchy capture and to collapse in Western Europe is now being proposed for the post-colonial world or the post-imperial world. And he argued that beyond these two paradigms of capitalism and liberal democracy, and the combination of those two, which he saw as instantiated in parliamentary electoral democracy, that beyond these two paradigms, and opposed to both was something that he called the 'Gandhian way'. So Gandhianism, he presented in his opening essay as 'a political and economic alternative to the dominant form of industrialization and electoral democracy in Western Europe'. So he saw and he drew from Gandhi's various writings and speeches, two key political aspects, and there are two key kind of precepts of Gandhianism that he presents to his audience. The first was a thoroughgoing decentralization of legislative sovereignty or legislative power, to directly elected directly participatory local councils. And I'll say more about how he exactly thinks this is going to happen in a second. But what the goal of this kind of decentralization of legislation was supposed to do for Narayan was to remove the intermediate it was to first of all remove intermediary organizations such as political parties, right, and as well as to get beyond the process of election itself or to get beyond electoral politics. The second was a largely agrarian collectivist economy that was based on cooperative collectivism, as he put it, with resources being held in common and wealth being managed by public bodies. And at the center of the kind of vision of Gandhianism, that Narayan outlined, for his leadership, stood the self ruling local Republic or the 'self-ruling commune', as he put it. When legislative power would be was accessible or made accessible to all adult inhabitants, through participation in a local council, as well as an underlying system of cooperative property ownership and economic production, then he argued this kind of communal Republic would instill within its citizens, the fraternity that was needed to sustain democracy. Right, so, so there's a kind of educative quality that he sees to Gandhianism. The problem that Narayan presents with the inter mingling or the intertwinement of liberalism or electoral democracy and industrial capitalism is that it leads to private self-interest and the use of state resources in the use of democratic means or institutions for private self interest by powerful actors. And he thinks that too, the way to avoid that is to actually construct an economic systems that compel people to engage with each other as equals, right. So he wrote in this in a passage that I just want to read out, "in villages, townships and communes, the proximity of every citizen to legislative sovereignty, and the practice of collectivist duty consolidate the advantages of direct democracy, it arouses a sense of patriotism, it lifts the individual beyond himself encouraging habits of cooperation, training the judgment and imparting experience in government to millions who cannot hope to enter representative assemblies." Right. So there's a real moral vision here, there's a real moral vision that comes out of a combination of political participation and economic collectivism, or participatory economic collectivism. And far from being the kind of conservative project Narayan insisted that this kind of Gandhian framework of republicanism was the most revolutionary or it was a particularly revolutionary alternative to electoral democracy, and that this was an alternative available to South Asian thinkers and South Asian political activists in the 1940s. So the question this raised, of course, is how exactly is this going to work? Right? So what does exactly a kind of communal democracy as Narayan put it, the phrases of coining a kind of communal democracy based on direct participation in lawmaking, and forms of cooperative economic production? What does this kind of democracy exactly look like? So the second half of this pamphlet was devoted to outlining the architecture of a post colonial state based on this vision of direct democracy. Each constituency and I'll just go into kind of give a sketchy overview of his plan here, just so we have a sense of the kind of vision of government that he has. Each constituency in Narayan's plan was to be governed by two main components. There was to be a large citizens assembly that was open to all adult inhabitants. And there was to be an executive committee committee, whose size varied between five and 11 persons, depending on the size of the constituency, the executive committee and its head were to be elected or chosen by members of the assembly from amongst itself for three year terms. So the first point that he emphasizes that there are no political parties operating in this in this scheme, the committee so this executive committee would deal with the daily administration of the community, and would act on laws that were being formulated separately by the Assembly. And critically, the committee would be answerable to this larger citizens assembly, and would report to its meetings at regular intervals. If the Assembly decided, by a two thirds supermajority vote, that either one or all members of the council had, quote, lost the confidence of the community, then the committee would be recalled, and new members would be selected. So it's very important for Narayan that even as there is a kind of delegation of authority of executive power and decision making and administrative power happening, that the delegated bodies are always kept kind of answerable to this broader citizens assembly. That's really key to this whole plan. And, of course, he then went on to say that this broad citizens assembly would also choose various specialized subcommittees from amongst itself. So there will be subcommittees dealing with issues of education, security, agriculture, industry, trade, taxation, and so on. There were to be no formal qualifications for being able to participate in the citizens assembly or for holding office, though literacy and what Narayan called experience of civic life, so greater experience in participating in politics, would be weighted as factors in election to or in selection to specialized positions. So there is a sense that he has, for instance, that the subcommittee's that are dealing with taxation require the appointment of people who have some who have sort of greater experience in knowledge of that, of that field. So there is certainly a conception in his vision of, of this knowledge specialization and the need for experts within a complex modern economy. But he wants to make experts always accountable to this kind of broad body of citizens. Right. And that's this kind of democratic aspect that he has to his plan for administrative specialization. And one of the in one of the most interesting sections of this text of the pamphlet Narayan suggested that election to be executive council in particular, so to the main kind of administrative body or the executive the sort of select the select a number of administrators who are selected from within the assembly, that this election should occur on the basis of random lots of voting by law or sortition. He argued that sortition was not the kind of archaic practice which had just existed in ancient Athens, but that it had already also been recorded in states in medieval India, and that it might be reintroduced at the local level to make access to political office as democratic as possible. Right. And I found this very interesting because we don't often think and by we, I mean, sort of the broad group of political scientists working on these topics, don't often think that sortition was something that was taken seriously by anti colonial political thinkers. Right. But it's that I was really struck when I came across this passage about the kind of value that someone like Shriman Narayan gives to sortition as a kind of way to make access to political office as accessible as possible as democratic as possible. He sees sortition as a way to further encourage civic education, political education, because it creates greater incentives for greater numbers of people to be aware of public affairs, right, because anyone can be selected for public office. So there's that that's a long standing argument for sortition. That goes back to to to Athens. But it's just very, very striking to see it as being featuring so prominently within a constitutional framework proposed for the end of empire. And it's also interesting to see sortition justified with reference to Gandhian principles. So within the scheme, administrative and judicial power would be vested in this executive council and the various subcommittees chosen either through appointment and election or through sortition. While legislative sovereignty, so the power to make laws and the right of recall, would be vested in a citizens assembly as a whole. So it's an assembly that was open to all adult inhabitants. That's what Narayan envisions as the democratic process, namely, the process of lawmaking within an independent, Gandhian Republic, but of course, he realizes that in order for this to conceivably exist on a large geographical scale, there needs to be a theory of State Building, right. And so the second, the final sections of the second half of the draft constitution outline a kind of elaborate framework of constitutional federalism, through which a network of self governing Republican assemblies are able to coexist within the same kind of Commonwealth. And this will give you a sense of this Narayan has this idea of a multi tiered structure of government, in which each body is is accountable to the body below it. So for instance of coordinating between these various individual assemblies, so each constituency is governed by citizens assembly, but coordinating between these individual citizens assemblies is a district council. The District Council consists of directly elected directly chosen representatives from groups of 20 local councils and he approximated that each district council represents around 20,000 citizens. This body like like bodies that will exist that upper tiers of government deals with inter Council infrastructure, and it functions as a kind of advisory body, right, and it deals with conflicts of jurisdiction, which might occur. But the district council would not have authority over the internal management of communities, assemblies could recall the representatives that they had sent on to higher levels. And each district council would then elect one of its members to proceed to a Provincial Assembly, which in turn would have three year tenure. So you can see a kind of scheme of federalism developing here. So provincial assemblies would again deal with conflicts of jurisdiction, and also in cases of regional emergencies, such as famine, provincial assemblies would coordinate relief efforts. And so finally, each Provincial Assembly selected members to proceed to a national assembly. And this National Assembly is a small unicameral body of around 25 representatives. And its role primarily is in terms of foreign policy. So the National Assembly would deal with issues of international conflict, would regulate customs, and impose foreign goods. Now, it is worth just saying parenthetically that foreign trade would be heavily restrained in this vision. It's a very, it's really a vision of sort of economic nationalism, or rather, of economic self sufficiency, because it is giving all economic power to local communities, as I'll talk say more about in a second. And this National Assembly would also manage systems of transport communication between its constituent jurisdictions. And one thing that as as Narayan kind of wrapped up the summary of this federal plan, one thing that he did emphasize was that the authority of this National Assembly was over lower jurisdictions would be quite weak. So with a sufficient two thirds supermajority vote in its assembly, constituencies could in fact as to withdraw from participation in the Provincial Council or the National Federation. So as he puts it, no territorial unit can be compelled to join the All India Federation against the declared and established will of the adults of that territory. So again, this is justified for him according to democratic principles of self government, and each assembly had the right to propose an amendment to the national constitution upon approval by two thirds of its members. So this is a federal system of government fairly elaborate, but what it isn't, is a system that revolves around parliamentary supremacy, right. So the National Assembly does not have the kind of power of lawmaking that a Parliament would have, for instance, within a kind of standard framework of parliamentary supremacy. And this kind of political scheme of federalism in which small self governing Republican assemblies are linked together through this tiered structure of government. This scheme of federalism was complemented with extensive economic socialism, right, so Narayan was adamant that the authority of local councils needed to extend into the economic sphere. So this is the point about giving maximum power over the market economy to these democratically elected councils is the point that I'd made earlier. And and so the power of these assemblies extended to reorganizing agriculture and industrial production through cooperative societies. So one section of the draft was titled national property and this is where Narayan really talked about the economic aspects of Gandhianism. Right? Again, he's justifying these ideas with reference to Gandhi's own writings, both Gandhi's importance, the importance that Gandhi has given to notions of caring for the community and to Gandhi's concerns about the violence of industrial capitalism, right. So this section again is justifying a kind of framework of socialism, according to Gandhian principles, which is really interesting. Now, while private property as such, would certainly not be abolished in the Gandhian Republic. So this is not a framework of state socialism by any means. But Narayan did insist that land tenure and industrial assets would be held by local assemblies and the executive councils, private individuals would be given leases to manage resources, but they would always be subject to oversight and control from the councils. And the most striking aspect of this document, and particularly of this section of the document was how Narayan framed this economic program as a project of moral education. The goal of restricting unrestrained private accumulation and private production for him was to quote eschew the patent evils of the present acquisitive society and the violence of industrial capitalism. The goal of this section of the Constitution, national property, was to as he put it, put form the character of a new kind of self bound by notions of fidelity to the public good. So at the core of the plan of the political plan that was being sketched out in Gandhian constitution, was a vision that was bringing together participatory democracy. So the ability of as many citizens to participate in the process of lawmaking as possible, participatory democracy on one hand, and economic socialism on the other, right. So participating in the making of law and participating in the management of the economy. And both frameworks were working together in this Gandhian plan, and Gandhism for Shriman Narayan was the combination of these two factors, if we understand Gandhianism as a kind of broad political theory. So both frameworks are presented as alternatives to the theory of liberal parliamentarism right. So liberal parliamentarism for Narayan was a theory of essentially of elite rule of rule by party elites were elected by by voters in at periodic intervals. And it was also a theory that did not really have a genuine or a systematic economic vision or a genuine or systematic answer to how to address the effects that a market economy might have on representative democracy. So Gandhian democracy is framed as an alternative to what he sees as the shortcomings of parliamentary government, then Shriman Narayan knew, both in the pamphlet and in his subsequent writings, that his views about the need for Gandhianism as a kind of alternative to liberal parliamentarism were not widely shared by the leadership of the Indian National Congress, which again was the main nationalist political organization at the time. And he knew that the dominant non Gandhian strand of constitutional thought and of nationalist thought in India in the 40s was unquestioning in its acceptance of representative democracy and particularly of representative democracy combined with state-led industrial capitalism or a kind of mixed form of state. What you know, what came to be called a mixed economy approach where the state takes a strong interventionist stance role in the economy, but it's still kind of interested in constructing forms of manufacturing and industrial production, right. So he knew this. So he knew this that the non Gandhian strand of the nationalist movement in India was fairly uncritical in how it looked at representative democracy at how it looked at parliamentarism and how it looked at state led industrial capitalism, and that the dominant strand of Indian political thought in the 40s was seeking to combine those two and to have that as the template of post Imperial political community. And Shriman Narayan was not wrong about this. So just to give an example. The person who was appointed as the lead constitutional advisor for the government of India, famously declared in 1947, that modern democracy should only ever be electoral representative democracies. And he insisted that quote, and this is a speech given in 1947 that, quote, decisions need to be taken by legislatures on behalf of the people. Right. So there is an argument that the kind of vision of democracy in which non professional politicians participate directly in the formulation of law is either unrealistic, or in sometimes even outright dangerous for a country like India, because it introduces too much democracy, right. So there's a fear, there's a kind of fear of excessive democratization that running through and is widely shared by some constitutional framers at the point at this point in history, and you can see this history very clearly in the in the kind of lead constitutional, the writings of the lead constitutional advisor. So this is exactly the kind of theory that Shriman Narayan was trying to respond to, because he asserted that dominant strand of constitutional thought in the 1940s was in fact amounting to essentially a form of elite rule, right, not genuine democracy. And indeed, as it came to force on the 26th of January of 1950, the Constitution of independent India declared its steadfast normative commitments to the people of India and to the formation of a new sovereign democratic republic. Article 79 of the Indian Constitution created a bicameral legislature with a specified list of lawmaking powers over all constituent parts of the union of India, standard kind of parliamentary theory of government. And then, the union parliament, of course, was bicameral in that it consisted of a directly elected lower house and an indirectly elected upper house, chosen by individual state legislatures and article 168 of the Constitution created an analogous structure at the state level, with a mix of bicameral and unicameral legislatures in different state jurisdictions. Now at the federal level, the two houses of parliament existed alongside an indirectly elected presidential executive with authority to pass ordinances outside of the standard process of parliamentary legislation, as well as a supreme court appointed by the president with powers of judicial oversight. So the constitution did contain and contains a system of checks and balances amongst three separate branches of government and the American model of separation checks and balances was very strong, was very influential in the formulation of this model. But as a whole, the document of the Constitution of India tilted heavily towards an ideal of national parliamentary supremacy, both over subsidiary legislative bodies and over the actions of the executive and the judiciary. So exactly the kind of model of democracy that someone like Shriman Narayan had been arguing against. And what I want to just end with is that if we allow our historiography of anti colonial political thought to be colored by this kind of subsequent development, then we risk overlooking theories such as Gandhian democracy. So, what is the value of returning to a text like Gandhian constitution for free India? I think, first of all, a text like this cautions us against keeping teleological narratives, right. Teleological narratives in which the forms of political representation which emerged at the end of empire are taken to be an inevitable outcome or a foregone conclusion rather than the subject of considerable contestation. So the first point I just want to emphasize and the first point that I think that this book makes is the need for those who are interested in the end of empire as a historical phenomenon. The need for those who are interested in this end of empire to pay greater attention to the paths that were not taken politically, to the paths that perhaps were taken only to be abandoned. Right. So the alternative theories of political order and political representation which existed and which did not try. And these are alternatives, which I do think we've lost in dominant understandings of the transition from Empire to nation. And then secondly, and finally, we might ask about the stakes of returning to such forgotten constitutional history is now in 2023. What is striking about our moment, certainly in South Asia, but also elsewhere, is the almost total collapse of democracy as a regime tied into party based electoral politics. Even as democracy has become a kind of basic standard of legitimacy for governments and constitutions, the meaning of democracy itself has been rendered synonymous with the election of party candidates, with forms of private financial capitalism, and with elite governance, often resulting in the dominance of what the international lawyer Susan Marx describes as low intensity democracy. So in this sense, returning to a defeated theory of participatory democracy and Republican constitutionalism gives us resources to at least begin to imagine a more robust and maybe more political egalitarian form of popular rule. And with that, I think I'll end and I'm looking forward to the questions and the discussions. Thank you.

Leslie Johns 51:41

Okay, thank you so much Tejas. Obviously, there's a lot of meat in this book, because I think I think you only really talked about one chapter of the book, right. And so obviously, there's a lot, a lot to talk about in there. And unfortunately, we only have six minutes left of our hour. So it's quite a lot of depth of presentation there. But I think looking at all of the questions that came in, I think I can really sort of condense them into sort of a few thematic topics. So maybe I'll get your sort of quick impressions to them, if you don't mind. I think sort of one theme that came in from a couple of questions that I had myself that I wanted to ask you about, was that, you know, we often think about India as being somewhat special in its path from Empire to nation, I think it's a phrase you you kept using, which is a really beautiful phrase, in that it was a relatively peaceful path, a relatively stable path. You know, it didn't descend into warfare, or autocracy, like so many other nations tragically experienced. And I guess I was wondering if you could give us any insight into how much these thinkers were a part of that specialness? Did they would you say they're part of that causal path? Did they spill over and affect other nations? You know, what is your insight on that specialness of India? Yeah.

Tejas Parasher 53:16

Great. Thank you very much. That's, it's great. So so two aspects of the question, I think I'll take each in turn. So the first point about the success of democracy. So I think one idea that is really important for us to keep in mind when we talk about stability of democracy is this idea of democratic deepening, that to the extent to which an electoral system coincides with people's acceptance of their own power, right? Like, do citizens of democratic states see themselves as empowered citizens who can hold governments accountable? And I think that was a question that this radical democratic tradition, particularly the Gandhian variant of has raised very prominently, right, like that. It's not enough just to have a kind of institutional arrangement of electoral democracy. But what you need also are, is a body of citizens who see themselves as democratically empowered. So one of the reasons I think that democracy has been stable in India is not simply the institutional aspects of it, but the fact that there has been a public culture and I think Gandhianism, the history of Gandhianism has a lot to do with that. And I think the tangible example for of that, that I can just briefly give is that when you have moments of democrat when you've had moments of democratic erosion in India, in the 1970s, for instance, then these kinds of ideas about participatory politics and the importance of having citizen participation in lawmaking have emerged to the fore to languages of protest. Right. Right. So they always, I think, provide a check to the potential erosion of democracy in democratic institutions through the cultivation of a public culture that emphasizes the citizen empowerment. So I think very important, so not simply the stability of democratic institutions, but actually the existence of a vibrant democratic culture, which is something that this tradition raised as its primary concern. And then the second point about what influence are one of the things that I am really interested in actually is the ways that at the margins of a lot of nationalist movements in, in South Asia, certainly, but also in, in Southeast Asia, Indonesia, and in the Caribbean, you have a lot of theories about the importance of participatory politics and an apprehension about post colonial state building as not giving sufficient attention to the importance of citizen participation. So you see this in Frantz Fanon, actually in the Wretched of the Earth, where he has this chapter that's really, really apprehensive about nationalist political parties and the way they treat the poor and the way they treat everyday members in saying that this can really morph into a kind of potentially dictatorial form of elite rule. Right? So one of the things I think, in terms of connections of this tradition with other contexts and other iterations is other iterations of anti colonialism is looking at critiques of nationalist leadership, democratic critiques of nationalist leadership that existed in I would say, a number of Imperial contexts and those critiques have kind of been forgotten, because we've been fixated so much on the kinds of states that actually emerge from the ruins of empire and not looking not being sufficiently attentive to critics of those kinds of states.

Leslie Johns 56:37

Okay. Do you do you mind staying with us for a few extra minutes? Okay. And a few people wrote in asking about Modi, you know, because I think sort of the, you know, the conventional criticism of Modi is, is that, you know, he's sort of taking India in a more autocratic tradition by sort of diminishing the powers of the parliament. But might another interpretation of Modi be that he's more directly connecting to the people and diminishing, you know, he, there's something about Modi that makes it sound like he's making more of a connection with the people, perhaps in a more direct form of democracy. And I was, I was wondering how do how do some of these theories connect to more of the populist politicians that we see going on in modern India?

Tejas Parasher 57:37

Great, thank you. So I think what is often called democratic backsliding is more accurately understood in the Indian case, but also in many other cases, I can think of Brazil, for instance, as electoral authoritarianism, more so than sort of a rejection of democracy. It's not so much that it's an it's an reduction of democracy simply to election, right. And the election of charismatic leaders, who can sort of speak on behalf and I'm thinking of Jan-Werner Muller's work on populism, for instance, that kind of the one leader speaking on behalf of this category of the people, and being so election is not the legitimized, election is in fact seen as the grounds of legitimacy of charismatic authority. But other structures of democracy are eroded, right. And so that kind of a minimum, it's a kind of Schumpeterian nightmare, like the worst version of Schumpeter in a sense. And I think this this, the kind of theory of popular politics you have here, it's very different because this tradition, the Gandhian tradition, and the tradition that Roy represented, that I was talking about earlier, is really apprehensive about single figures or members of of political parties, for instance, claiming to speak on behalf of the people. Right. So it's, it's that it's very critical of the act of the monopolization of representation itself, the act of representation, being monopolized either by a political party as a whole, or by an individual, is something that this tradition is not only critical, of, but it's actually seeking to protect against. And that's why Narayan has all these theories about how to make people accountable to lower levels. So it's all meant to kind of protect against the rise of dictatorship or authoritarianism, right.

Leslie Johns 59:21

I see Modi as a modern manifestation of this tragedy.

Tejas Parasher 59:25

Not all, not at all, not at all. No, no, because this is, it's it's meant it's very fearful of people speaking on behalf of popular sovereignty, popular sovereignty as something that can be represented or concentrated within a single person, which is the justification for charismatic leadership. Right. So I think that's important to note because anti parliamentarism need not always go in that kind of authoritarian direction. And that's just I think, something that I think this tradition highlights.

Leslie Johns 59:58

And then one final question then from our fearless leader here at the Burkle center, Alexandra, who you thanked in your introduction, I think she was quite inspired by the theory that you discussed and was sort of very intrigued by the implications of it for US politics, particularly given a lot of the stalemate that we see going on in the US Congress. And was wondering if you had any thoughts about, you know, how the ideas from, you know, Indian political theory might have relevance for thinking about US politics, political reform in the modern context, as either an alternative to the current party system, or perhaps some form of supplement to the way the US political system currently works?

Tejas Parasher 1:00:54

Yeah, great. Thank you. I mean, one of the things that I was most struck by is about this. I mean, the text like Gandhian Constitution is the scale of its ambition. So it just, it doesn't simply say that these are problems that will exist at the end of the British Empire, but that these are problems that beset all countries with electoral democracy. So it says that these are ideas that can potentially exist in some way, some form or another in Western Europe, in the United States. So certainly, I think Narayan himself would be very much a fan of us looking to him for solutions to American political paralysis. That is the kind of ambition he would have wanted. So yes, so I think that certainly the party system and the ways that party systems can lead to political deadlock, but also the ways that both parties is, you know, the whole election of candidates and the caucus system, the ways that sort of election itself is something that parties play an outsized role in is something that we need to think more clear, more critically about, right, like, what role do parties play within theories of democracy. And that's an issue that I think he raises. Now, there is, of course, in the American system, that whole theory that goes back to Tocqueville that the place where you really have robust democracy in the United States is sort of New England town halls, and, you know, local politics. So and I think that's actually something that the Narayan framework also is in conversation is with and also pushes us to take more seriously that, perhaps one, you know, it while thinking about the large scale problems at the federal government level of party politics, the role of lobby groups, and so on, and the intersection of finance and campaign financing in elections and the problems that leads to in terms of democratic legitimacy. While being critical of that, we also need to take local politics much more seriously sort of, you know, in the way that Tocqueville saw as the real strength of the American federal model, that it did allow for a certain kind of participatory politics to exist at local levels. And I think that's something that actually Narayan wanted sort of people in the 1940s to go back to more. So I would say that that that is something that those who are interested in political reform in the United States also need to think more about sort of, how do we, you know, revitalize the democratic potential of local citizens politics.

Leslie Johns 1:03:12

Okay. Thanks so much, I see that we did have a couple of questions come in, in the last couple minutes, from people who really know their Indian political theory, because there are lots of really long Indian names, I will just say, for those of you who are super excited and wrote in really late, I really encourage you to go out and get a copy of the book, where your very detailed questions I'm sure will be answered by the book. Thank you so much for joining us Tejas. It's definitely a really exciting publication. And, you know, thank you so much for contributing to our knowledge of this important topic. And thanks so much to our audience today for joining us and being excited to learn so much more. This is our last Burkle book talk of the calendar year. But we certainly have many exciting events both online and in person that you can learn about from the Burkle website. And we'll also be back in January with an exciting new round of events that we'll be posting soon on our website. Okay, so thank you so much, and Goodbye, everybody.

Tejas Parasher 1:04:26

Thank you Leslie this was a pleasure.

Leslie Johns 1:04:27

Okay, bye Tejas.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai