Indian Political Thought and Movements- New Interpretations and Emerging Issues

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This collection of twenty-one essays on Indian Political Thought and Movements: New Interpretations and Emerging Issues is designed to serve students of UG (Honours) and PG level courses of studies for the degree in Political Science, Sociology and Modern Indian History as well as for general readers and researchers. Based originally on the revised version of the papers presented in a National Seminar on the same theme at the Department of Political Science, University of Burdwan, West Bengal (India) on 23-24 December 2003, the collection incorporates also some papers not presented in the Seminar but written by well-known political scientists and sociologists of India. "Indian Political Thought and Movements are a newly introduced subject(s) in the universities, spawned on as a result of a growing awareness about the indigenous tradition of political ideas, as a reaction to west-centric political theories and ideas, which are often found to have little or no value for the evolving yet complex reality of India, and also the growing realization among the scholars and opinion makers of the efficacy of movements for social change and empowerment. The fact that the tradition of Indian political thought was shaped by the needs of India's multi-faceted liberation movements, that there was a dialectical relationship between political thought and movements in India during the pre-independence periods, has reinforced our claim to undertake such a combined study. All in all, we aim at developing further the intellectual content of the courses of studies on the subject by bringing together twenty-one well-written papers on various aspects of Indian political thought and movements of pre-and post-independence periods.

We take this opportunity to record our thanks to the University of Burdwan, the Indian Council of Social Science Research (New Delhi) and the State Co-Operative Bank, Kolkata for extending financial support for the Seminar although they are in no way responsible for views expressed in the book. The editors also wish to thank the contributors, particularly the invited authors, for their contributions. It is a pity that this volume was deprived of the contributions from Thomas Pantham and Aswini K. Ray (who promised) whose presentations at the Seminar though brought quality to the discussion. For reasons of space, the length of some good quality essays had to be cut to size. We hope the contributors will appreciate the constraints in such an endeavour. Some invited authors had to submit papers within a short notice. We remain grateful to them for their co-operation.

We wish to thank Professor S. Datta Gupta for his advice on publication of this volume. Our colleagues in the Department have offered suggestions which were helpful. Mr Prasenjit Pal, Lecturer in Political Science, B. U. is to be specially thanked for translating an article from Bengali into English within a short time. We would like also to record our thanks to those who have offered advice at various stages of this publication.

Mr. Koushik Kushari has done an excellent computing job in word processing and printing out the drafts in the process of preparing the MSS for which he deserves thanks.

Finally, the views expressed in the essays are those of the individual authors. We would feel amply rewarded if the students find the collection to be of use, and the academic community and opinion makers find in it some food for thought.

The tradition of political thinking in India is rich, varied, and complex. The ancientness of the civilization, its capacity for accommodation of various foreign elements in the making of a composite culture, and the very complex political evolution due to foreign invasions, more particularly the British colonial rule for two centuries, have been factors that have given it richness, variety and complexity Paradoxical though it may seem, Indian political thought, particularly of the 'modern' period ie.. from the period of colonial rule, remains a virgin field so far as serious theoretical probing is concerned. The subject thus remains neglected' in the study of Indian politics and society. This is in sharp contrast to the west where social and political thinking in the past forms as much a part of the contemporary understanding of reality as the contemporary thinking. The Indian political thinking in the British period has mostly been considered as part of understanding the anti-colonial national liberation movements. That is a context-bound approach to the understanding of Indian political thought. There was no denying that dialectic of social and political thought and action, combined to form the mainstay of the glorious tradition of anti-colonial liberation movements of the Indians. In other words, the decades-long liberation movement, its varying phases, forms and methods, was not bereft of ideas; on the contrary, the arena of the movements was, in fact, that of the contestation of ideas, beliefs and methods, and forms of government, issues of self-government and good governance, rights and obligations. nationhood and the state, civil society and so on having implications going beyond independence. The debates on the issues mentioned above that took shape in the writings of pre-independence thinkers were most often richer than that of the post-independence period. Had it not been so, India's independence in 1947 would have witnessed much more chaos and blood-shed than what accompanied the Partition of India and the birth of Pakistan. Even in the latter, a certain 'theory' had to be utilized as an ideological backcloth for secession. The point that is stressed here is that the significance of Indian political thinking is not to be imprisoned within the four walls of the history of independence, but taken further to way for her overall decline. Sadly, Tagore's society-centric political ideas have remained far removed from the political-constitutional set up of India, which is based on state-centricity. The recent move in India to revitalize the panchayati raj institutions and grassroots village-based democracy is symptomatic of the limitations of state-centricity, and calls for paying serious attention to India's society-centric political theory.

The basic tenor of our argument is the relevance of the political ideas of Indian thinkers for today's and perhaps tomorrow's India, and hence the continuity of the tradition of political and social thinking in India.

That is to say, there is need for utilizing the political thinking of India in pre-independence period for understanding Indian politics in the post-independence period. Sankar Ghose, one of the early authors on Indian political thought, argues that the issues on which the Indian thinkers and leaders in the past debated still remain unresolved: tradition versus modernity, conservatism versus change, secular nationalism versus religious nationalism, the relations between social and economic freedom and political freedom, socialism, communism and Marxism and so on."

This is a valid argument to make, but his own study does not highlight the relevance of the ideas he has surveyed in the book for the issues in post-independence India. For example, his discussion on "Constitutionalism and Liberalism" is well-grounded historically, but delinked from the post-independence concerns for the same issues particularly relating to increasing enfranchisement of the varied sections of the people in representative institutions down to the level of panchayats. The most distinctive aspect of the treatment of political thought in this collection is the relevance of political ideas to our contemporary reality.

The very method of the formulation, historically speaking, of the political ideas in modern India in terms of a dialectical response to evolving reality of the colonial rule and the anti-colonial resistance for decades, has been instructive in the critical treatment of the same in the post-colonial period. Excepting a very few." scholars on Indian political thought have mostly neglected this aspect of understanding Indian political thought. As a result of the delinked study, Indian political thought has remained a rather subject of historical interest, and often boring to the students of Indian politics. Far from considering the gamut of Indian political thought as elements of a colonial country's entry into modernity, with all the complexities and tensions, it has remained a virgin field for serious political theoretic research given the added complexities and tensions of the project of a post-colonial modernity in the age of globalization.