by Rouf Dar
Can the Revolution be Legalized? Or, Can the Constitution be Decolonial?
The anticolonial revolution was legalized in the postcolonial constitution; at least an attempt was made, by the Congress which spearheaded both the processes. Sandipto Dasgupta makes this very compelling argument based on an in-depth analysis of the constitutive components of these processes. This book reads decolonization and constitutionalism as processes rather than mere events. It unpacks the processes, understanding intricately the elements of what successful decolonization and transformational constitutionalism entails. Both these processes are studied conjointly, and are synthesized in a book that is first of its kind in studies on the Indian Constitution.
The book appears to be interspersed with binaries. Anticolonial vs postcolonial, demos vs ethnos, street politics vs administrative politics, singularity vs multiplicity of imaginations. The important binary that forms the core of the book though, is the anticolonial and postcolonial version of the Congress party. Shifting from a mass politics-based party prior to independence, the Congress mutated into a governmental party that sought to institutionalize the gains of the decolonial moment. This metamorphosis was intentional, the book argues, and the primary reason for it became the fear of the disruptive and revolutionary energies of the masses. The same energies that successfully drove the British out, and unveiled the perversion of British liberalism embedded in the colonial empire, became a source of anxiety in the postcolonial founding. Apparently therefore, the postcolonial state-making project was dominated by the need of unity, and a consequent unitary state, which trampled over the multiplicities of imaginations that the masses possessed.
The need for postcolonial unity leads to the important question of federalism. As recent scholarship has shown, colonial India and the anticolonial movement was replete with diverse conceptions about the postcolonial organization of political power. This was in consideration of the humongous diversities that made up the Indian subcontinent, and the postcolonial Indian state too. The unitarian tendencies trampled these conceptions, with rare exceptions, and disallowed their institutionalization in the postcolonial polity.
What interests me here is the notions of federalism in African colonies. Scholarship points out to the use of federalism as an anticolonial philosophy wherein as many rights were squeezed from the colonial empire as possible, all the while thinking and contemplating about postcolonial imaginaries beyond the predominant nation-state system. Federalism could also be thought of a viable design to institutionalize the social diversity made ever so salient by the colonial empire. In India, instead of respectfully accommodating an inherently diverse set of peoples, federalism became merely an expedient strategy to integrate, assimilate, and manufacture a homogenous nation. The integration of princely states, which is touted to be a glorious feather in the cap of the Indian state-making project, is enough a testimony to the erasure of diversities in postcolonial India.
One could then ask, did the formation of a homogenous nation-state overpower the possibilities that decolonization was pregnant with? Further, at a more abstract level, is constitutionalism, which was transported to the whole world through the gun, the ship, and the pen, incapacitated as a framework to fully realise the revolutionary potential of masses and the multiplicity of political conceptions in the postcolonies?
Continuing with this, Sandipto argues that the constitutional project was not able to capture the imaginations of the masses. One of the outcomes of this failure was the communal violence leading up to Partition which, he argues, was due to this failed realization of the self-instituting and self-determining powers of the anticolonial movement. But what forms would that realization take? And would those forms be tenable in the expedient need for postcolonial unity? In other words, how would the possibly divisive conceptions be reconciled in the formation of the postcolonial state?
As we know, there have been multiple narratives explaining the politics of the Muslim League culminating in the demand for Pakistan. Did Congress’ conflict with Muslim League on this issue symbolize what would the mass politics would look like? If so, and if we are to accept the argument that Pakistan was the result of the exercise of a political agency, the travails and travesties of that political process point out that divisive conceptions in the formation of postcolony were sought to be suppressed from an early stage. Ambedkar’s own political trajectory in lieu of the marginalized castes is yet another case in point. Both these cases show that the Congress prioritized national unity over the expression of political diversity. In the light of this, can we then say that it was prudent from the Congress to be skeptical of the disruptive tendencies of the mass-based revolution?
This book shows that the use of repressive measures in postcolonial India had its seeds sown long earlier in 1937, when the Congress provincial regimes in Madras and Bombay used censorship and sedition laws to suppress dissent. Post-independence, it was to deal with the Communists who became a sort of the new “other” (the remnant Indian Muslims were already subdued by the horrors of Partition) against whom the repressive laws were incorporated. On the one hand, while the constitution envisioned a systemic and controlled transformation of the society, on the other hand, the repressive clauses were added into the same constitution to ensure unity, and homogeneity, of the postcolonial Indian state. Again, as we can see, the logic of a unitary state trampled over the rights of the individual and groups, and Congress was there to oversee the whole process.
The question of religious minorities, especially Muslims, after Partition emerged in a number of ways. They were marginalized in the constitution-making debates, their voices were stifled at times, and liberal-secular arguments were used at times to eventually rid them of the political safeguards that were afforded to other minorities. In such a context, what does the Congress’ historical familiarity with using repression do to the expedient use of “legitimating vocabulary” to deny political safeguards to Muslims?
In other words, the book hints at a supplementary, even if somewhat different, explanation of this problem compared to the existing scholarship, by focusing on the Communists. One can infer that Muslims were denied political safeguards not only because national unity, development, and social justice held utmost priority for the Congress but also because the Congress had perfected the art of repression to allow any sort of concession to the Muslims. What the “legitimating vocabulary” thesis misses is this blatant otherization of Muslims post-Partition, which an implicit reading of the book allows us to account for.
It is only recently that recent scholarship has ventured into asking what prompted a constitutionalist like Azad to call the constituent assembly “my new prison”? Or similarly, why the Congress secularism is deemed to be merely a “rhetorical strategy” in which communal prejudice was embedded? The book does not touch upon this issue that is so relevant in contemporary India and has more often than not tarnished the grandeur of both transformational as well as transformative projects.
In popular scholarship, often those protesting the constitution’s inability to realise their self-determined political rights are branded as “non-constitutionalists” whereas those sticking to the constitution despite its failure called as “constitutionalists.” Such issues though, are remnants of the erasure of mass politics that Sandipto talks about in the book. He argues that had the mass politics been allowed to self-determine the postcolonial institutionalizations, transformational constitutionalism would have been a success. He concedes though: maybe the mass politics could have failed to generate sustainable futures, nonetheless it would have been worth because then the process overall would have been more democratic.
The discussion until now makes me a bit skeptical about the neatness of the anticolonial vs postcolonial binary. There is no doubt about the fact that the masses and their energies channelized by the Congress formed the fulcrum of the anticolonial movement. But simultaneously, the Congress was apprenticing for a possible transfer of power. The pre-1947 experiences of using repressive measures and the handling of the demands of Pakistan and marginalized castes are cases in point. So, the anticolonial mobilization led to a postcolonial disillusionment because those very masses who were supposed to speak in the constitution as “We, the people” became being spoken about, or in the words of Sandipto, “They, the people.” The unity of the anticolonial movement broke at the moment of decolonization — into the elites and the masses — and resurfaced as an imposition in the postcolonial project.
Jammu & Kashmir is probably the only exception wherein a land redistribution programme was imposed in a top-down manner but whose legitimacy was derived from the mass politics preceding subcontinental independence. True to his socialist inclinations, Sheikh Abdullah emerged as a popular leader in the 1930s, galvanizing the masses into an anti-autocratic movement against the incumbent Dogra regime. In doing so, he found able ideological company in Nehru and the Congress who wholeheartedly supported the progressiveness of his party’s Naya Kashmir Manifesto.
To implement his radical vision of redistribution of property, Sheikh even went to the extent of bargaining an autonomous relationship with the Indian Union, excluding the application of Fundamental Rights of the Indian Constitution to the State of Jammu & Kashmir from hindering his redistribution plans. Though not without criticism, the programme was a success and remains by far the only instance of a radical redistribution of property. The question that springs to my mind here is: Does this qualify as a decolonization of property relations in Jammu & Kashmir? Does this imply how a mass anti-despotic politics can lead up to the refashioning of the postcolonial?
Sandipto does not venture into this arena, surprisingly. The land reforms in Jammu & Kashmir, as we know, were radical compared to the limited land reforms that were carried out in few places in postcolonial India. The radicality of the former was demonstrated in the fact that J&K did not pay compensation to the landlords whose land was confiscated and redistributed whereas the latter witnessed, as Sandipto shows, persistent debates on the nature and amount of compensation, and even the invocations of Fundamental Right to Property in judicial cases. The positive takeaway from the book though, is that it provides a template and a framework to employ decolonization — both as an event and as a process — to study the process of self-determination in the postcolonial polity.
Can we define India’s decolonization as a revolution? Can the revolution be legalized, or, is the constitutional-legal framework adept to deliver the prospects of a decolonial revolution? The answer to both these questions that the book seems to provide is a firm NO:
“It meant that one could have law or one could have revolution – but not both at the same time. Such a view suggested a failure of the project of transformational constitutionalism, since its two constituent terms could not coexist.”
The revolution that the Congress envisioned was top-down, imposed, without conflict and disruption, and in absence of the masses. Transformation through planned development became the sole objective of the constitutional project. A “revolution through popular politics” was substituted by “transformation through law” which eventually defeated the prospects and purposes of decolonization.
As with other concepts imported from the West, it is opportune to question this very foundational incapacity of constitutionalism to capture the multiplicity of imaginations in an anticolonial revolution during the decolonization process. Towards that end, Sandipto’s book is a beginning well done.
Bio: Rouf Dar has a PhD in Political Science from the University of Kashmir, focusing on constitution-making processes in the Global South. He was the Inlaks-King’s India Institute Visiting Research Fellow 2021 at King’s College London.
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