Beyond Parliament: Gandhian Democracy and Postcolonial Founding

• Author: Tejas Parasher
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00905917221092821
• Published date: 01 December 2022
• Date: 01 December 2022
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917221092821

Political Theory

2022, Vol. 50(6) 837 –860

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/00905917221092821

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Article

Beyond Parliament:

Gandhian Democracy

and Postcolonial

Founding

Tejas Parasher1

Abstract

Through a study of Gandhian political writings in mid-twentieth-century India,

this article explores the neglected question of how the issue of representative

democracy shaped anticolonial thought. The rise of a Gandhian perspective

on electoral representation was made possible by the account of modern

democracy given in Gandhi’s "Hind Swaraj" (1909). From the 1930s, four key

Indian thinkers influenced by Gandhi expanded on "Hind Swaraj" to argue

that capitalist economics were a threat to democratic equality and produced

the kinds of unaccountability and elite capture of legislatures that they

identified in Western European parliamentary states. In response, Gandhian

thinkers developed proposals for federalist postcolonial constitutions,

combining a system of participatory legislative councils with collectivist

agrarian socialism. I trace the intellectual origins of Gandhian democratic

thought in the 1930s and 1940s and outline how its main proponents

articulated ideas of antiparliamentarism and moral economics. Revisiting the

Gandhian tradition, I suggest, highlights the importance of economic ethics

in participatory theories of democracy and popular sovereignty.

Keywords

M. K. Gandhi, representation, popular sovereignty, anticolonialism

1University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

Corresponding Author:

Tejas Parasher, University of Cambridge, King’s Parade, Cambridge, CB2 1ST, UK.

Email: tp491@cam.ac.uk

1092821PTXXXX10.1177/00905917221092821Political TheoryParasher

research-article2022

838 Political Theory 50(6)

In the political field we find true democracy absent in all Western countries. It

masquerades under the cloak of parliamentary organization, in which real

power is vested in a single dominating group or personality.

—J. C. Kumarappa (1936)

In recent years, political theorists have given renewed attention to the issue of

postcolonial founding. What did it mean to imagine and establish political

communities free from European imperial rule in the middle of the twentieth

century? What kinds of political arrangements were advocated by the thinkers

and leaders of national liberation movements? Responding critically to an ear-

lier scholarly consensus that took anticolonialism to be a straightforward

adoption of the European nation-state (e.g., Plamenatz 1960), theorists have

come to attend more closely to the diversity of languages deployed within

anticolonial argument in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean between the 1940s

and the 1970s. These languages include, for instance, a moral emphasis on

transforming the character of leaders and citizens (Kohn and McBride 2011,

14–76); the adoption of nonsovereign, antistatist strategies (Roberts 2015,

141–81); projects of regional union intended to address the transnational scale

of extractive economic orders (Getachew 2019); and theories of nonviolent

civic activism (Tully 2008, 243–309).

New studies have thus highlighted the intellectual originality and the ideo-

logical diversity of anticolonial thought. They have shown how decoloniza-

tion in the twentieth century was a richer and more far-reaching matter than a

simple transfer of power. Yet political theorists have not yet fully examined

the link between anticolonialism and a foundational governing concept of

twentieth-century politics: the idea of representative democracy. The omis-

sion is especially striking given that colonial independence and the emer-

gence of representative democracy as the dominant model of popular self-rule

were both postwar phenomena. Decolonization in the British, French, and

Dutch Empires after approximately 1945 coincided with the ascendance of

what Jan-Werner Müller has called “disciplined democracy” in Western

Europe, wherein representative institutions came to be seen as a necessary

bulwark against the unpredictable, authoritarian excesses of unchecked, ple-

biscitary popular power associated with the 1930s (2011, 146–50). Through

the immediate post-WWII years, a broadly Schumpeterian understanding of

democracy as leadership by elected members of a professionalized political

class became consolidated in European constitutional thought and practice.

The logic of electoral representation—the authorization of a few to act on