The Political Institutions and Theories of the Hindus: A Study in Comparative Politics c12.s2: Section 3. Valuation of India's Democratic Attainments
The Political Institutions and Theories of the Hindus: A Study in Comparative Politics c12.s2
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Section 3. Valuation of India's Democratic Attainments
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Intensive researches will no doubt in the future furnish a more realistic and detailed history of the popular institutions of the Hindus. It is not improbable that one day we shall know, age by age, and country by country precisely to what extent the peoples actually participated in the work of government.
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But already we are in a position to conclude, first, that despotism is not the sole message of the East, and secondly, that the West also has been the prolific parent of despotism. On the other hand, the democratic elements in the Oriental polities must not be interpreted too liberally so as to imply the "referendum", the "initiative", "gildsocialism" and so forth of the latest constitutional developments.⁵
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⁵ Dicey's *Law of the Const.*, xci—c; Oberholtzer's *Referendum in America*, pp. 1—44, 471—513.
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First, it need be observed that in monarchical India there was no *organic* connetion between the people and the council of ministers, and the council itself had its tenure under royal pleasure. The Oriental Richelieus and Bismarcks were, *in law*, no better than the "king's men" as had been the ministers of England previous to the introduction of the Cabinet system, e. g. in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Hindu ministers may sometimes have been king-makers and often virtually the rulers of the country; altogether, the monarchy may thus have been tempered by the counsels of the wise, the "virtuous" "guardians" of Plato's *Republic*. But the good government enjoyed by the people in a benevolent "aristocracy" or the enlightened despotism, say, of a Kautilyan *râjarṣi* must not be compared with the rights of individuals as modern constitutional law understands them. Despotism was no doubt modified by the councils, but they could not place "legal" restraints on the exercise of royal power.
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Secondly, the so-called village communities, those "little republics", were not independent of the kingdoms and empires. They did not enjoy the rights of "sovereignty" in historical times. In Vedic India they may have been conterminous with the autonomous tribes. Subsequently they may have continued for some time as urban or rural republics. But during the period under survey they remained normally but the lowest rungs of the ladder in a system of imperialism, i. e. of centralized national administration.
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Thirdly, it would be wholly misunderstanding the local and county administration of modern times, on the one hand, and the independent city-states and clan-republics of the ancient and mediaeval world, on the other, if one were to proceed to interpret the negative advantages of *laissez faire* due to imperial weakness as identical with the conscious assertion of authority by the people in the provinces. Compulsory non-interference on the part of the central government whether through lack of facilities for communication or through military incompetency does not imply such positive exercise of political power by the districts, cities and villages as is possible or at any rate as is being sought in modern nation-states.
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The development of *śreṇîs*, *gaṇas*, folk-moots, ministerial councils and the like should not therefore be seriously adduced as evidence of qualification to meet the problems of the republican polity with which Young Asia has to grapple today. Even in Greece the people have chosen to subvert the *gaṇa* and restore Constantine to the throne (1921). Asia's past political experience is of no greater value for present purposes than Greek, Roman and feudal attainments can possibly be to the modern Latins, Slavs or Teutons.¹ For, the modern republic, not to speak of its recent sovietic phase, was utterly unknown to the Occident until very late times. It is an essentially new phenomenon in world politics comparable to the steam engine, the parent of the "Great Society". To take an extreme instance, the novitiate through which the Orient has been passing in China since 1912 is not qualitatively different from that through which France had to pass.
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¹ In the controversy raised by the Montagu-Chelmsford Report the nationalist sentiment is officially represented by Sir C. Sankaran Nair, who quotes Rhys Davids, Havell, Aiyangar, Banerjea, Bhandarkar, and Jayaswal in the *Minute of Dissent to the Government of India's Despatch of* March 5, 1919, secs. 2, 3, 4 (*Indian Review*, July 1919), while the Anglo-Indian opinion is non-officially voiced by Mr. Vincent Smith in *Indian Constitutional Reform viewed in the Light of History*, pp. 18—21. According to the methodology followed in the present treatise both these viewpoints, in so far as they have bearing on the political tradition or genius of India, are fallacious extremes. The English historian of Hindu and Mohammedan politics manages, as usual, to ignore the despotism in occidental tradition and forget the fact that down to 1789 European masses, no less than the Indian, were as innocent of "elective councils and diarchies" as is the man in the moon of the binomial theorem. On the other hand, the Hindu *svarâjist* is almost inclined to minimize the unprecedented character of the cumulative assertion of the human spirit in politics from the American revolution to the Russian revolution. The problem before the descendants of Vajjians and Yaudheyas is today as easy or as difficult as that before the inheritors of Greek and Roman democracies. An appeal to history at the present juncture is irrelevant and useless.
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It is well to remember how the very idea of a republic stank in the nostrils of Europeans when the American republic was born. The general antipathy to the first French republic was as notorious as is today the sentiment against anti-propertyism and sovietic *svarâj*. The whole Napoleonic war was really a war of self-defence on the part of the trustees of republicanism against the enemies of popular government who were financed and directed by England. The Holy Alliance of 1815 also under the leadership of Russia was a union of monarchies, organized to put down démocratic upheavals and help the crowned heads. It was to withstand the effects of this "league of nations" that the Monroe Doctrine was launched in 1823 on behalf of the republics of the New World. In the history of the constitution, President Monroe's message belongs to the same category as the military challenge of revolutionary France to the ruling dynasties of Europe. Similarly the struggles of 1830 and 1848 had to be fought on every inch of European soil on the question of republicanism (at any rate, democracy or consitutionalism) vs. absolute monarchy. All these facts indicate the enormous opposition in the teeth of which the modern republic has had to grow up. They point also to the profoundly novel character of the theories and institutions associated with it.
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The modern republic is, in the first place, a country-state and not a mere city or clan. Secondly, and as a consequence of this, it is not a "direct" democracy of all the people sitting in legislative sessions. The system has its life in the principle of representation. Thirdly, it is not part of a larger whole, not a "home-rule" territory, but an absolutely independent organism, a fully self-determined or *selbständig* political unit, an unconditioned *sva-râj*.
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Only one republic of this type existed in the world at the time of the French Revolution. But the example of Switzerland seems to have played no part in the evolution of modern republicanism. The Girondist demagogues used to illustrate their lectures not so much from contemporary or mediaeval history as from ancient Greece and Rome. But these Classical republics were not republics in the modern sense of the term.
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Athens was but a city-state. It was, besides, based on a fundamental injustice. Under Pericles the number of free citizens was only 25,000. The number of slaves was then 300,000. Moreover, Pericles was all but imperator in name.
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Rome also had originally been a city-state like Athens, Sparta and Thebes. Subsequently, she became mistress of Italy. The Roman Senate was a republican aristocracy during the period of conquests — "an assembly of kings" as it appeared to the emissaries of King Pyrrhus of Epirus. But Rome did not merge herself in an "Italian" republic. Roman Italy was essentially the empire of a republican city-state over other cities. The "Roman franchise" was granted to the subject cities very sparingly. Further, with extra-Italian expansion the republic was converted into a formal empire.
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The Middle Ages produced several types of republican states, aristocratic, oligarchic, and even democratic. The chartered towns of England and France, the Hanseatic cities of north Germany, and the Italian cities like Florence, Venice or Naples, are the best examples of such republics. But the English and French cities never claimed "sovereign" rights; the German cities were formally "free" but actually semi-dependent, as they had to acknowledge more or less the jurisdiction of feudal lords, markgrafs, or emperors; it was only the Italian cities that may be said to have approached the ancient Hellenic city-states in real autonomy and independence. "North Italy is the only region in medieval Europe where the greater part though not the whole of a continuous territory is divided up into the domains of a number of city states just as the more civilized portion of ancient Greece was."¹
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¹ Sidgwick's *Development*, 277.
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On the whole, however, the mediaeval cities, because of their partial or complete sovereignty, were the greatest stumbling blocks in the evolution of nationality in Italy and Germany. It is on the graves of these republics that modern Italy and Germany had to be raised. It is evident therefore that these are not the prototypes of the republic as understood today.
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Towards the end of the eighteenth century, the Americans and the French had thus no precedent, ancient or mediaeval, to go by in the constitution of their republics. They were the first to break the ice. Not in a worse or more helpless condition is Asia placed today. Like the occidentals, Asians also cannot get any help from their own past tradition. Naturally, therefore, it is the examples of the United States and of France that have inspired Asia in the nineteenth century, as they have done the Latin Americans, in new political experiments. The constitutional monarchy of Japan, the limited Shahnate of Persia, the parliamentary regime of the "Union and Progress" party of the Young Turk, Chinese republicanism, and the nationalist movements from Calcutta to Cairo, are thus so many links in the chain of thousand and one influences that the East has been imbibing from the West in modern times. This spiritual conquest of Asia by Eur-America from Washington and Adam Smith to Karl Marx and Lenin indicates, therefore, the absolute limit¹ of the extreme claims that may be advanced on behalf of ancient Hindu achievements in politics.
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¹ Uyehara's *Pol. Dev. Jap.*, pp. 78, 79, 113, 114; Bland's *Li Hung-chang*, pp. 251—260; Macdonald's *Turkey and the Eastern Question*, 53—55; Vambery's *Western Culture in Eastern Lands*, 324—354.
Linked texts (1)
- Kauṭilīya Arthaśāstra — Kauṭilya, Sanskrit