Opinion The Republic of India, after January 22

As a child, I was enchanted by stories of the Ramayana that I read with my grandmother. A favourite book was the Tuktuke Ramayana by Nabakrishna Bhattacharya that narrated Valmiki’s epic in simple Bengali verse. Later in life as a historian, I explored the many iterations of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata that travelled across the Indian Ocean. Rabindranath Tagore believed that the Southeast Asian versions were as original as the ones to be found in India. He called for more comparative studies of the epics. He grumbled that one day some German scholar will do the work and after that, by agreeing or disagreeing with that thesis, Indian scholars will earn PhDs.

I have always been moved by the grandeur of the Ramayana as a literary epic and the religious sensibility of the many who flock to Ram leelas performed in the villages of north India. However, the event at Ayodhya had little to do with either literature or religious faith; it simply provided a climax of sorts to a triumphalist political narrative based on religious majoritarian identity. On January 22, I re-read my mother Krishna Bose’s speech that she delivered in the Lok Sabha more than two decades ago in a debate on Ayodhya. Explaining that she had learned her Hinduism from Swami Vivekananda, she asserted that if an edifice is built on a foundation of violence and hatred, Shri Ram will not reside there. She pleaded in the name of Mahatma Gandhi and Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose for good sense to prevail.

The sun did rise on the morning of January 23, 2024, the 127th birth anniversary of Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, the one leader who had assured equal rights for members of every religious community and united them all in the struggle for freedom. His close aide Abid Hasan has recounted how Netaji had turned down an invitation to the Chettiar temple in Singapore saying, “What! Come to your temple where even Hindus of other castes are not permitted entry, not to speak of members of other communities who are equally near and dear to me.” He agreed to go flanked by Mohammad Zaman Kiani and Hasan when the precincts were offered as a venue for “an Indian national demonstration”. As for Netaji’s Azad Hind Fauj, this is how Hasan described the army of liberation: “Every region in India was represented and every religion and every caste, mixed inseparably together not only in bigger formations but even in small platoons and sections, each unit being a living tribute to the unity of India”.

While Netaji’s gallant fight for freedom is celebrated, what is less well-known are his thoughts about India’s future constitution and his ideas about what he called “an independent federal republic”. Even before resigning from the ICS, he wrote to Deshbandhu Chittaranjan Das on March 2, 1921: “We must now craft India’s Constitution based on Swaraj”. In fact, the blueprint of a federal constitution was unveiled by the Swarajists a hundred years ago in 1923 alongside a pact for the equitable sharing of power between Hindus and Muslims. The best in Indian political thought categorically rejected the constitutional devices of the 1919 and 1935 Acts to perpetuate British colonial rule.

Once the pledge of Purna Swaraj was taken, January 26 was observed as our Independence Day from 1930 to 1947. Upon the onset of World War II, Netaji rejected the Congress proposal of a Constituent Assembly under the auspices of an imperialist government. He recalled how Sinn Fein had scorned Lloyd George’s Irish Constitutional Convention and the Bolsheviks had walked out of Russia’s constituent assembly in 1917. In his view, only after the nationalists seized power could a legitimate Constituent Assembly be elected.

It is a pity that when the British were being forced to quit India as a direct consequence of Netaji’s wartime achievements, his tragic death robbed our country of his contribution to the making of the Indian republic. His elder brother Sarat Chandra Bose was elected to the Constituent Assembly from Bengal, but he resigned when the Congress high command accepted Partition along religious lines in exchange for power at the British Raj’s unitary centre.

A handful of followers and admirers of Netaji did try to argue in favour of substantive democracy and genuine federalism. K T Shah, whom he had inducted into the National Planning Committee in 1938, brought an amendment to Article 1 to proclaim: “India shall be a Secular, Federal, Socialist Union of States”. It was negated. He also wanted to categorically deny the centre any authority to change the name and boundary of any state without the explicit permission of the state legislature. Hari Vishnu Kamath strenuously argued against the Emergency provisions in our Constitution, especially the power to suspend habeas corpus. B R Ambedkar conceded that these provisions could be misused but expressed the hope that they will remain a “dead letter”. By contrast, Sarat Chandra Bose in a January 1950 article in the Indian Law Review described the authoritarian features inherited from the colonial Government of India Act as “a time bomb” and potentially a grave threat to Indian democracy.

During the 1975-1977 Emergency, the suspension of habeas corpus was deemed to be constitutional by four out of five judges of the Supreme Court. In the recent verdict on Kashmir, the Supreme Court has unanimously acknowledged the constitutional authority of the President, on the advice of the Prime Minister and his cabinet, to alter the status of any state of the union.

Many observers have noticed a second republic in the process of formation. Some see the need of a new Constitution for a new India. The words of the Preamble to our Constitution are indeed very beautiful and inspirational. However, certain clauses of what a recent author has called “the colonial constitution” lend themselves to be interpreted in a way that buttresses authoritarianism at the expense of democracy. To be able to strengthen democracy, it is necessary to draw upon an alternative political tradition of anti-colonial constitutionalism. Federalism, egalitarianism, and religious harmony are its main pillars.

The writer is Gardiner Professor of Oceanic History and Affairs, Harvard University