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Conclusion: Building a Nondomination Contract In their efforts toward legal equality and an inclusive political sphere, feminist and other progressive activists have both drawn upon and advanced the Indian framers’ promise to build “the fullest” democracy in India and have worked to resolve the postcolonial social contract’s contradictions in a liberatory direction. In addition to challenging gender, caste, and minority group subordination in the Indian polity, their approaches to social justice point to new configurations of the social contract more generally. Indeed, if the paradigmatic agreement in social contract theory is an agreement to be ruled, struggles to deepen Indian democracy can be seen as generating agreements not to rule on the interpersonal, group, and state levels. Taken together, such agreements can form the basis of what might be called a “nondomination contract,” an expressly egalitarian reformulation of the social contract that fosters the participatory construction of social and political solidarity. The notion that there could be an emancipatory reconfiguration of the social contract is contested in critical contract theory, and a central question for critical contract theorists is whether the notion of social contract should be kept as a normative device or be discarded altogether. Charles Mills argues for keeping it, on the grounds that the idea of a social contract can be a mechanism for egalitarian transformation, despite its use as a tool of subjection and marginalization. Mills suggests that the fundamental principles of social contract theory—its premise that state and society are human creations and that we are all fundamentally free and equal—can be mobilized to argue for justice and inclusion. In contrast to the ways in which women, the poor, and people of color have been excluded from the social contract, he argues that we can build a truly inclusive contract. This new conclusion 109 contract, he suggests, “will require a fundamental rethinking of the depiction of the creation of society and what real egalitarianism now morally requires of us.”1 Whereas Mills advocates for a more inclusive social contract, Carole Pateman warns that using the language of contract to work for social and political transformation is extremely risky. In Pateman’s view, the contract is the particularly modern mechanism by which relations of domination and subordination take on the guise of freedom, on both the individual and the collective levels. In a discussion with Mills about this point in their co-authored Contract and Domination, she explains that “the point of the social contract is that in the modern state individuals give up their right of self-government to another or a few others.”2 What legitimates this move is that these individuals have supposedly agreed (explicitly or implicitly) to be so ruled. Indeed, in her earlier work The Problem of Political Obligation, Pateman notes that the paradigmatic agreement in social contract theory is quite particular (and peculiar): it is a promise to obey. Instead of contract, she suggests that we explore new models of free agreement as a mode of constituting our social and political relationships. “Why introduce contract at all?” she asks. “Why not start by trying to move to another model of free agreement? . . . Why not find other terms for ‘free agreement talk’ that also convey the meaning of a voluntary mutual undertaking and offer some hope of moving away from all the associations and assumptions of ‘contract ’?”3 For Pateman, the concept of the social contract cannot escape its baggage as a mechanism of domination and subordination. In the words of Audre Lorde, the social contract is an example of a “master’s tool” that cannot be used to rebuild the “master’s house.”4 Instead of a new social contract, Pateman urges us to build our political and social houses with the brick and mortar of free agreement. These two approaches are not necessarily incompatible. The struggles for egalitarian pluralism in India can be seen, in part, as fostering arenas in which people are free to agree on the terms and conditions of their own relationships, a move consistent with Pateman’s emphasis on the importance of free agreement between people as a liberatory mode of constituting social and political relationships. The push for an optional egalitarian civil code, an important part of the struggle against the legal domination of women, can be seen as an effort to generate a collective commitment to legal equality at the state level, a move in tune with Mills’s call for an egalitarian reformulation of the social contract. Taken together...

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