Decolonizing Democracy: Transforming the Social Contract in India

Chapter 3 Framing the Postcolonial Social Contract

3 Framing the Postcolonial Social Contract We are aiming at democracy and nothing less than a democracy. What form of democracy, what shape it might take is another matter. The democracies of the present day, many of them in Europe and elsewhere, have played a great part in the world’s progress. Yet it may be doubtful if those democracies may not have to change their shape somewhat before long if they [are] to remain completely democratic. We are not going just to copy, I hope, a certain democratic procedure or an institution of a so-called democratic country. We may improve upon it. . . . We stand for democracy. It will be for this House to determine what shape to give to that democracy , the fullest democracy, I hope. —Jawaharlal Nehru, December 13, 1946 In his opening speech to the Constituent Assembly, the nationalist leader and future prime minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru articulated what he saw as the Assembly’s task in its framing of a new constitution for India: the forging of a new, more inclusive model of democracy.1 Such a democracy would abolish discrimination on the basis of sex, race, religion, and caste, and would not only benefit its own citizenry but stand as a model for the world. In the course of the framers’ deliberations, these goals were significantly advanced but also compromised. On the one hand, the Assembly framed a constitution that challenged some of the inequities that had long plagued democratic polities elsewhere—polities democratic in name only. In the transition to independence in India, the framers challenged what Carole Pateman and Charles Mills call, respectively, the sexual and racial contracts underpinning liberal democratic theory and instituted a new kind of social contract, a “postcolonial social contract” designed to foster racial, gender, caste, and minority group equality. On the other hand, despite 60 decolonizing democracy the explicit constitutional provisions meant to further equality, the framers failed to adequately address the legal subordination of women and the political marginalization of both women and minority groups in the new Indian nation. The postcolonial social contract forged by the Constituent Assembly was thus deeply ambiguous, at once promoting and constraining struggles for caste, minority group, and gender justice in India. democracy’s new signatories Although the British touted democracy as an ideal, colonial administrators in India allowed Indians only limited access to democratic representation under the Raj. According to the Indian historian Sumit Sarkar, “the realities of a Raj uncompromisingly white and despotic” were thinly veiled by “an ideology of paternalistic benevolence, occasionally combined with talk of trusteeship and training towards self-government.”2 Even after the colonial government (under immense pressure from the nationalists) began to take steps toward increasing indigenous representation in government, the British jealously guarded the terms and conditions of the political order in India as their racial prerogative. The British government, for example, infuriated nationalists when it sent an all-white delegation, the Simon Commission, to India to consider the appropriate model of government for India in 1928 and designed the Government of India Act of 1935 with little Indian input.3 The 1930s and 1940s in India were marked by increasingly vociferous calls for the creation of a Constituent Assembly to frame a constitution for an independent India. In 1934 the INC declared that the only acceptable outcome of negotiations with the British was “a constitution drawn up by a Constituent Assembly elected on the basis of adult franchise.” Later, deeply disappointed by the 1935 Government of India Act, under which Britain granted Indians only limited self-government, the INC resolutely reaffirmed that “the Congress stands for a genuine democratic state in India where political power has been transferred to the people, as a whole. Such a state can only come into existence through a Constituent Assembly having the power to determine finally the constitution of the country.”4 By 1945 independence was near; wearied by World War II and faced with growing agitation for freedom in India, the British were ready, in the words of the 1942–45 satyagraha (civil disobedience) campaign, to “quit India.” The Labour Party in Britain campaigned on the promise to transfer power to India, and soon after taking office declared its support for the creation of an indigenous Constituent Assembly for India. Freedom had been won. framing the postcolonial social contract 61 Critical race and feminist theorists have documented the ways in which...