Beyond Parliament: Gandhian Democracy and Postcolonial Founding

Abstract

Through a study of Gandhian political writings in mid-twentieth-century India, this article explores the neglected question of how the issue of representative democracy shaped anticolonial thought. The rise of a Gandhian perspective on electoral representation was made possible by the account of modern democracy given in Gandhi’s "Hind Swaraj" (1909). From the 1930s, four key Indian thinkers influenced by Gandhi expanded on "Hind Swaraj" to argue that capitalist economics were a threat to democratic equality and produced the kinds of unaccountability and elite capture of legislatures that they identified in Western European parliamentary states. In response, Gandhian thinkers developed proposals for federalist postcolonial constitutions, combining a system of participatory legislative councils with collectivist agrarian socialism. I trace the intellectual origins of Gandhian democratic thought in the 1930s and 1940s and outline how its main proponents articulated ideas of antiparliamentarism and moral economics. Revisiting the Gandhian tradition, I suggest, highlights the importance of economic ethics in participatory theories of democracy and popular sovereignty.