Decolonizing Democracy: Transforming the Social Contract in India

Introduction: Decolonizing Democracy

Introduction: Decolonizing Democracy December 9, 1946, was an extraordinary day in the history of democracy. On that day, Indian delegates to the Constituent Assembly, the body convened to frame a new constitution for an India free from British colonial rule, met for the first time. The task before the Constituent Assembly, as the future prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru declared in his opening speech, was the forging of a new, more egalitarian model of democracy, what he called the “fullest democracy,” which would abolish discrimination on the basis of religion, race, caste, and sex.1 Despite this pledge, however, the Assembly produced a deeply ambiguous constitution that perpetuated the legal subordination of women and the political marginalization of both women and minority groups, even while it asserted gender, racial, caste, and religious equality as a fundamental right. Why, when the framers were intent on building an inclusive, egalitarian democracy, did they produce a constitution that so compromised justice for women and minority groups? In this book, I argue that this contradictory outcome is in part linked to what could be called a politics of compensatory domination in which political authorities seek to build consent to their rule by consolidating and/or enabling forms of intergroup and intragroup rule. The central normative argument of this book is that the ongoing project of making our political relations more democratic requires challenging this politics of compensatory domination. In making this argument, I analyze the reconfiguration of what Carole Pateman and Charles Mills call, respectively, the sexual and racial contracts underpinning liberal democratic theory in the transition to independence in India. I suggest that the racialized fraternal democratic order Pateman and Mills describe was significantly challenged by the nationalist and 2 decolonizing democracy feminist struggles against British colonialism in India but was reshaped into what I call a postcolonial social contract by the framers of the new Indian constitution. I explore contemporary struggles that link movements for gender and minority group justice in ways that challenge the contradictions embedded in the contract and point the way to more just configurations of democratic solidarity. approach: critical contract theory As an approach to understanding political life, social contract theory focuses on the terms and conditions of consent to political authority. Social contract theorists address a central question: Why, if we are all free and equal, would a person accept being ruled by others? The urgency of this question arose in part when political and social upheavals debunked distinctions such as noble birth, the divine right of kings, or the natural rule of the father as adequate justification for political authority. Instead, political theorists such as Thomas Hobbes, in The Leviathan, and John Locke, in his Second Treatise of Government, argued that legitimate political authority is grounded in an agreement among equals—a social contract—in which citizens consent to exchange their natural freedom for the order and protection a government supposedly can provide. This project is written in the methodological vein of what might be called critical social contract theory, a subset of social contract theory. While Hobbes and Locke suggest that it is in our best interests to submit to political authority, theorists more critical of such an agreement use a social contract approach to point to less benign reasons why supposedly free and equal people might agree to obey the state. For example, Jean-Jacques Rousseau , in Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, Carole Pateman in The Sexual Contract, and Charles Mills in The Racial Contract retell contract stories in order to uncover the operative power relations in the polity and the values that justify them. Instead of seeking to legitimate political authority, these critical social contract theorists ask the following kinds of questions: What are the terms and conditions of the social contract? What groups are included or excluded as signatories of such a contract? Does the social contract benefit some groups over others? These questions help to elucidate, in the words of Charles Mills, the “non-ideal contract at the heart of the ideal contract.”2 According to Rousseau, for example, the social contract generates a political order that protects the property of the rich. In contemporary political theory, Pateman and Mills argue that the often hidden motivations introduction 3 for the transference of political sovereignty from self to state include the consolidation of gender and racial power. For Pateman and Mills, respectively , the social contract is both a sexual and...