by Grant Wong
Tejas Parasher is Assistant Professor of Political Theory at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Radical Democracy in Modern Indian Political Thought (Cambridge, 2023), the first study of a neglected tradition of participatory democracy in South Asia. His research interests lie in the relationship between empire, democracy, and statehood within modern political thought. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 2019 and was formerly Junior Research Fellow in Political Thought and Intellectual History at King’s College, University of Cambridge.
He spoke with Grant Wong about his recent article in JHI’s July 2024 issue, “M. N. Roy and the Problem of Parliamentary Democracy.” They discuss the political thought of communist and radical humanist revolutionary Manabendra Nath Roy (1887–1954), its place within the intellectual landscape of a newly independent India, and how this contextualization complicates both historiographical and contemporary understandings of Indian politics.
Grant Wong: In your article, you argue for a reading of twentieth-century Indian political thought that emphasizes conflict over consensus. You criticize the literature’s embrace of a “parliamentary reading” of anti-colonial constitutional thought that neglects its intellectual diversity. To do so, you juxtapose the ideas of M.N. Roy against those of his contemporaries: “Recovering Roy’s polemics against Indian nationalists… helps us move beyond viewing the democratic thought of India’s founding as a straightforward adoption of a British political model.” What do we miss when we neglect thinkers like Roy? What do we stand to gain by adopting your perspective?
Tejas Parasher: There has long been a tendency amongst political theorists to view the globalization of democracy in the twentieth century through a diffusionist lens. Since the mid-1940s, many have understood the formation of democratic republics in new, post-imperial countries in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean as indicative of the appeal of the kinds of representative, electoral constitutional systems which prevailed in postwar Western Europe—British parliamentarism, French republicanism, and so on. This is the perspective we find outlined very clearly, for instance, in John Petrov Plamenatz’s On Alien Rule and Self-Government (1960), one of the first attempts by a political philosopher to examine the triangular relationship between democracy, empire, and nationalism. Plamenatz interprets the democratization of former imperial territories as an enthusiastic embrace of Western representative democracy by nationalist elites, a kind of ideological consummation of liberalism. India, as a particularly successful instance of post-imperial, democratic nation-building, occupies a central place in these narratives.
One of the main aims of my article is to highlight how the diffusionist historiography of democratization is based on a selective, partial understanding of anti-colonial nationalism. The narrative almost entirely elides those anti-colonial thinkers who were deeply apprehensive about representative government and liberal democracy as these regimes existed in the immediate aftermath of World War II. To recover mid-century critics of liberal democracy—of whom M.N. Roy was one of the most vocal and most ambitious—is to gain a more historically accurate understanding of anti-colonial nationalism, especially regarding the deeply contested nature of sovereignty and representation at the end of empire.
GW: As you note, Roy was in the minority in his opposition to parliamentary governance, even as contemporaries including Mohandas K. Gandhi were similarly skeptical of it for not being democratic enough. How might we take anti-parliamentarism seriously while also not over- or underemphasizing its influence within the history of Indian political thought?
TP: Anti-parliamentarism was a surprisingly prevalent discourse in Indian politics in the 1930s and 1940s. Its proponents were Leftist organizations such as Roy’s Radical Democratic Party [RDP] and factions of the Socialist Party of India [SPI], but also thinkers whom we might, broadly, describe as social conservatives. Gandhi’s far-reaching critique of modern democracy, first articulated in Hind Swaraj (1909) and then repeated throughout the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, certainly did much to lend public support, visibility, and legitimacy to strands of anti-parliamentary thought. Part of the article tries to explore the distinctive nature of Royist democratic thought, as it evolved in conversation with—and sometimes as a direct reaction against—Gandhian mass politics.
It is true that anti-parliamentary thinkers were always dissenting voices within the broader Indian political landscape. Taking the tradition seriously while not overemphasizing its overall political or constitutional influence means paying closer attention to its animating problem: namely, what is the relationship between popular sovereignty and electoral representation? Does multi-party representative democracy through adult suffrage enable popular sovereignty—the founding principle of modern democracy—or constrain it? Much of the debate about democratization in South Asia in the 1940s was in fact a debate about political representation—about how to secure a political voice, through representation, for various competing constituencies.
Anti-parliamentary thinkers were unique in moving away from the consensus and in problematizing the process of modern political representation itself. Their challenge to representative government entailed a total rejection of party politics—to the extent that M.N. Roy’s thought of the 1940s and early 1950s might be considered “anti-partyism” as much as “anti-parliamentarism”—and a suggestion that representation needed to be supplemented with other popular decision-making mechanisms for an independent Indian state to be truly democratic. This broadly critical orientation towards a politics of representation remains a valuable intellectual resource for contemporary political theorists as we try and understand the problems of majoritarianism, exclusion, and accountability generated by inherited structures of postcolonial democracy.
GW: You conclude your analysis of Roy’s political thought with an extended reading of his Radical Democratic Party’s Constitution of Free India (1945), which championed “popular sovereignty—the ‘supreme sovereignty’ of the ‘entire people’—and insisted that the primacy of popular sovereignty meant the supremacy of legislatures over all branches of government.” How do texts such as these complicate our understanding of Indian democratization?
TP: Constitution of Free India is a fascinatingly ambitious document. It was written more or less single-handedly by M.N. Roy in Dehradun for RDP cadres, published in two separate editions in 1944 and 1945, and then republished by the Bombay-based lawyer V.M. Tarkunde, a lifelong veteran of the RDP, in 1979. It belongs to a genre of texts which we might call “India’s forgotten constitutions”—to borrow a term from Robert L. Tsai’s pioneering work on American constitutional history. Over the past decade, there has been a striking profusion of historical scholarship on India’s constitutional moment of the 1940s. But the focus has largely been on the Constituent Assembly meetings in New Delhi between 1946 and 1950 and, consequently, on the nationalist process of constitution-drafting, which culminated in the 1950 republican constitution of independent India.
The constitutional settlement of 1950 therefore comes to stand in as an embodiment of Indian democratic thought—its most notable achievement and its most fully crystallized institutional expression. Texts such as Roy’s draft, with their strident advocacy of popular sovereignty, their opposition to the separation of powers, and their dissatisfaction with the 1950 settlement, give us a much more complicated picture of how democracy and constitutionalism were brought together in the late 1940s. As documents of political thought, they draw our attention to how constitutional discourse was formulated outside of the formal process of nation-building. They constituted alternate visions of political community and challenges to liberal constitutionalism.
GW: Indian politics has loomed large in the news as of late, especially given the recent 2024 Indian general election, which saw Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP] suffer significant losses against its primary opposition, the Indian National Congress [INC]. Given your article’s focus on political heterogeneity over homogeneity, how does your perspective inform our understanding of India’s present political moment?
TP: A major constitutional problem which has emerged and re-emerged in India since 2014 is federalism. The question of whether India is a “federation”—and, if so, what kind of federation it should be—was posed by the international lawyer C.H. Alexandrowicz in 1954, four years after the country’s constitution came into effect. It has only become more pressing in the last ten years. Opposition to federalism, regionalism, and to any substantive constitutional recognition of internal heterogeneity is a key mechanism through which democratic erosion occurs in India. Some of the most interesting new work in South Asian political theory has, in turn, sought to explore the possibility of using federalism as a counter-majoritarian and even an anti-authoritarian measure. I am thinking, for instance, of Partha Chatterjee’s The Truths and Lies of Nationalism (2022).
Given this ongoing political context, it is important for political and constitutional theorists to attend more carefully to the different ways that federalism was envisioned in modern Indian politics—how it was justified, its relationship to popular sovereignty, and the precise institutional forms it took or was imagined to take. M.N. Roy’s writings of the 1940s provide one model of how democratic principles can be used to structure a democratic state that allows for regional, local self-determination.
GW: As you conclude, “the existence of Roy’s theory within the field of Indian political and constitutional thought in the 1940s is indicative, above all, of the diversity of democratic thinking at the moment of twentieth-century decolonization, of the traditions that come to be forgotten when we interpret democratization at the end of empire as a straightforward embrace of representative government.” How would you suggest future scholars examine this intellectual diversity, both within Indian politics and decolonization more generally? And lastly, where do you plan on taking your research from here?
TP: Political theorists should pay closer attention to the critics of nationalism within anti-colonial movements in the twentieth century. All too often, opposition to empire is reduced to nationalism. Nationalist leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru, Sukarno, and Kwame Nkrumah are taken as the main proponents of anti-colonial thought and practice. But when we turn to thinkers like Roy or Frantz Fanon, who had become very critical of the trajectory of nationalist politics by the 1950s, we find notions of political community which diverge quite significantly from the dominant nationalist view. They also present us with quite different theories of representation, party politics, and citizenship.
I am now starting a second book project on the problem of the state within Indian political thought, from the end of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. I am interested in how the sovereignty of the state over social and economic life came to be justified by Indian thinkers with reference to ideas about social order, cooperation, conflict, and historical backwardness, as well as in the emergence of anti-statism as a reactionary discourse within early twentieth-century Indian politics. I plan to begin this project with an essay on anti-statism in the writings of the sociologist Radhakamal Mukerjee (1889–1968). I am especially interested in how Mukerjee’s engagements with nineteenth-century evolutionary theory informed his thinking on statehood.
Grant Wong is a History Ph.D. candidate at the University of South Carolina, where he studies twentieth century United States popular culture and consumerism. His research focuses on how capitalist market demands and discourses of taste affected the production and reception of pop and rock music in the post-Second World War U.S.
Featured Image: M.N. Roy on cover of “Ogonek,” Internet Archive, user Ogonek, PDM 1.0.
