Fromthe Journal of the History of Ideas: 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 interviews Tejas Parasher:
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.
