In 1954, Justice Vivian Bose of the Supreme Court proclaimed that the Indian Constitution had “blotted out, in a single magnificent sweep, all vestiges of despotic energy in India; that the colonial previous was obliterated and a brand new order born”. This is a half-truth.
The enactment of India’s Constitution marked the demise of imperialism and the daybreak of democratic republicanism. But it didn’t embrace the philosophy of Mohandas Gandhi who symbolically continues to steer the lengthy and unfinished march to India’s redemption, carrying the torch of ahimsa and swaraj – the refusal to hurt and the sovereignty of the self.
Gandhi’s philosophy is particularly pressing in gentle of Congress veteran C Rajagopalachari’s prophetic warning in 1922, written from a jail cell: “Swaraj won’t without delay, and even for a time to come back, convey higher authorities or better happiness for the individuals. Elections and their corruption, injustice, and the tyranny of wealth, and insufficiency of administration, will make a hell of life as quickly as freedom is given to us.”
Rajagopalachari’s pessimism seems to have prevailed over the optimism of Jawaharlal Nehru’s “tryst with future” as India’s establishments failed to ensure justice and dignity for all.
More than 23 years in the past, the Indian authorities’s Report of the National Commission to Review the Working of the Constitution in 2002 captured this malaise: “There is pervasive disenchantment with the working of the establishments of democracy. People themselves appear virtually to have resigned to what they contemplate their inevitable destiny […] yielding place to a way of revulsion towards the State and a deep mistrust towards the equipment of presidency.”
This Gandhi Jayanti, Gandhi’s beliefs of swaraj and ahimsa and his emphasis on the ethical duties of Indian residents are value revisiting. His legacy can provide steering and solace for the Indian republic and breathe new life into its Constitution.
The village is the person
Gandhi insisted that the village needs to be the first unit of political and financial life, with industries dispersed moderately than concentrated. For Gandhi, swaraj was the nucleus of unbiased India, with the autonomous village republic at its coronary heart.
Gandhi’s ideas of particular person swaraj and village swaraj are usually not contradictory however complementary: self-disciplined people kind the ethical foundation for democratic village republics, which in flip present the social and financial setting for people to flourish.
But the founders of unbiased India envisioned modernity because the primacy of the person. Gandhi’s imaginative and prescient, which will be traced again to his e-book Hind Swaraj (1909), clashed with Nehru’s choice for parliamentary democracy and industrial modernity.
Writing to Gandhi on January 11, 1928, Nehru stated he didn’t agree with Gandhi’s views that “India had nothing to study from the West and that she has reached a pinnacle of knowledge previously”. “I neither assume that the so-called Ramarajya was superb previously nor do I would like it again. I believe the western – or moderately industrial – civilisation is sure to beat India, although with many modifications and diversifications,” wrote Nehru.
Gandhi and Nehru did agree on basic rights and financial development. But when the Congress Working Committee finalised a constitutional blueprint in September 1945, one other spherical of debate adopted. Nehru stated the village was intellectually and culturally backward and that “narrow-minded persons are more likely to be untruthful and violent”.
Similarly, BR Ambedkar, chairperson of the Drafting Committee of the Indian Constitution, rejected Gandhi’s village-centric mannequin: “What is a village however a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism? I’m glad that the Draft Constitution has discarded the village and adopted the person as its unit.”
In 1946, Shriman Narayan Agrawal revealed The Gandhian Constitution of Free India, a 60-page treatise endorsed by Gandhi. It mixed rights with duties, vested sweeping powers in village panchayats and even included an ironic “proper to bear arms”. Agrawal in contrast the Gandhian village to the Greek city-state: small, cohesive, participatory and ethically grounded. Gandhi, endorsing the work, admitted that it mirrored his important concepts.
An professional committee appointed on July 8, 1946, finally endorsed Nehru’s imaginative and prescient. Gandhi, disheartened, withdrew from constitutional debates. On April 1, 1947, at a prayer assembly, he lamented: “Nothing will occur on my phrases. My command won’t run henceforth […] But now, no one listens to me.” However, Gandhi was not inflexible about his constitutional imaginative and prescient. Amid Partition and the communal conflagration that ensued, Gandhi endorsed parliamentary democracy with a powerful central authorities.
But a long time on, Gandhian village republics are of philosophical and sensible relevance for India.
Renewal, particular person swaraj
In Gandhi’s creativeness, the spiritually empowered particular person was the fulcrum of society and the state. Scholar Ananya Vajpeyi, in Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India, notes that swaraj and ahimsa have been central to Gandhi’s political vocabulary. Only a morally enlightened citizenry, India’s “collective self”, can save the Republic from corruption and violence.
Arghya Sengupta, in The Colonial Constitution: An Origin Story (2023), additionally factors out Gandhi’s emphasis on ethical values. He observes that Gandhi noticed himself because the “ethical compass, guiding the nation in a journey to find the values that might nourish it and gave it energy”.
“The structure would take impact later, as soon as the nation grew to become ‘acutely aware of its personal energy’,” writes Sengupta. He says that Gandhi expresses these beliefs clearly in The Constructive Programme, a e-book written in 1941, which “was a categorical affirmation of the importance of morality in constructing unbiased India”.
Gandhi envisaged a republic based on the ethical beliefs of reality and non-violence moderately than on energy and coercion. In what grew to become his final will and testomony, Gandhi writes of a Lok Sevak Sangh to hold ahead the beliefs of ahimsa and swaraj.
He additionally proposed that the Indian National Congress remodel itself into this Sangh, devoted to constructing a non-violent society via grassroots self-rule. His design of panchayats, structured in ascending tiers of self-governance, reveals his unwavering dedication to decentralisation and energy within the palms of individuals.
Gandhi’s concepts had discovered actual expression when the princely state of Aundh, beneath Raja Bhawanrao Shriniwasrao Pant Pratinidhi and guided by Maurice Frydman, adopted a “Swaraj Constitution” in 1939. It created a three-tier system of self-governance, with empowered panchayats and a literacy-driven citizens.
Days earlier than he was assassinated, Gandhi considered constructive staff as vigilant guides to maintain Parliament in examine. Ultimately, Gandhi’s religion lay within the extraordinary citizen – imbued with the beliefs of ahimsa and swaraj – to behave as a transformative pressure.
Democracy in India won’t be saved by its democratic establishments alone however by the ethical braveness of its residents. Rabindranath Tagore’s legendary Ekla Chalo Re, additionally Gandhi’s favorite poem, captures this ethos:
“If nobody solutions your name, stroll alone…
When darkish clouds cowl the sky and reality is shrouded,
Be the flame that burns, even in the event you should burn alone.”
Faisal CK is Deputy Law Secretary to the Government of Kerala and writer of The Supreme Codex: A Citizen’s Anxieties and Aspirations on the Indian Constitution. Views are private.
