The Indian constitution has been in the news lately for a multitude of reasons, but ever heard of a Gandhian constitution that was written in the years 1945-46 even before the constituent assembly was formed?
Written by Shriman Narayan Agarwal, the Gandhian constitution (for which the foreword was written by Gandhi himself), in some senses, was trying to do the opposite of what the Indian constitution set out to do, says Dr. Sujit Sinha, faculty at Azim Premji University.
Dr. Sinha who teaches about worldwide alternatives to industrialism through a course titled “Living Utopias” was talking at a session on ‘Gandhi - Science, sustainability and deep democracy’ at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE) in Bengaluru.
“The Gandhian view about the current constitution would be that it is basically an instrument to make a strong national government which will nurture, protect, and promote industrial civilization,” said Dr. Sinha.
Adding that the constituent assembly debates was a perfectly laudable exercise in 1940s, he noted that Gandhi was however opposed to industrial civilization.
Placing villages at the heart
The Gandhian constitution strongly advocated for decentralisation and put forth village panchayats as the core units of political and administrative setups. The document accorded extensive powers including judicial functions to these units.
“Agarwal called this a nonviolent constitution. He also said it is only possible through three types of decentralisation – political, economic and technological,” said Dr. Sinha.
On the other hand, during the constituent assembly debates, although suggestions came up to include the panchayat raj-based administration which Gandhi stood for strongly throughout his life, it couldn’t find a place in the final draft.
Citing Gandhian activist-scholar Sailen Ghosh, Dr. Sinha read out from his article The Unstable Foundation, “No scope was provided for participatory governance on the basis of consensus at assemblies or villages as Mahatma Gandhi had wanted. To him, this system of participatory governance was the very bedrock of democracy. Yet this was disregarded by the founding fathers of the Constitution. But this disregard was not accidental.”
“Participatory form of democracy needed production technologies which were amenable to local decision making. A leadership which had decided that the basic inputs of agriculture would be chemical fertilizers, pesticides, electricity generated by large power stations, and water from irrigation canals, many of it connected to massive dams knew that these were beyond the purview of locals. To it participatory democracy was meaningless.”
However, a provision for Panchayati Raj was placed in the non-justiciable directive principles of state policy and was constitutionalised in 1992 through the 73rd constitutional amendment act.
The philosophical anarchist
Gandhi was no lover of powerful nation states and elections either, noted Dr. Sinha.
In July 1931, he wrote in Young India, “To me, political power is not an end but one of the means of enabling people to better their condition in every department of life. Political power means the capacity to regulate national life through national representatives. If national life becomes so perfect as to become self-regulated, no representation becomes necessary.”
“There is then a state of enlightened anarchy. In such a State everyone is his own master. He rules himself in such a manner that he is never a hindrance to his neighbour. In the ideal State, therefore, there is no political power because there is no State. But the ideal is never fully realized in life. Hence the classical statement of Thoreau that the government is best which governs the least is worthy of consideration.”
Dr. Sinha noted that Gandhi was fully aware that the greed for power was as dangerous as the greed for wealth and hence needed to be contained.
“In that sense he was philosophically an anarchist,” he said.
Gandhi at IISc
In 1927, Gandhi visited the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bengaluru and addressed the students. Excerpts of his speech were quoted in an article titled ‘Towards an understanding of Gandhi’s views on science’ by Shambhu Prasad.
To the students, Gandhi said, “I expect much more from you than the ordinary man in the street. I tell you, you can devise a far greater wireless instrument, which does not require external research, but internal - and all research will be useless if it is not allied to internal research - which can link your hearts with those of the millions. Unless all the discoveries that you make have the welfare of the poor as the end in view, all your workshops will be really no better than satan’s workshops.”
According to Dr. Sinha this gels with Gandhi’s core ideas of Antyodaya, which is the upliftment of the poorest, and Gram Swaraj. He noted that not only did Gandhi want scientists to work for such an aim, but during the lecture given at IISc he wanted modern scientists to take villages into confidence, explain to them what they were doing and why they were doing it, and why science should be supported by villages.
Gandhi’s critique of industrialisation has often led to him being labeled as anti-science.
Expressing strong reservations against industrialism, he wrote in Young India in 1928, “God forbid that India should ever take to industrialism after the manner of the West. The economic imperialism of a single tiny island kingdom (England) is today keeping the world in chains. If an entire nation of 300 million took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.”
Noting that Gandhi mostly used the term ‘modern civilization’ to denote industrialism, Dr. Sinha said that the one-line distillation of Gandhi’s definition of industrialism would be ‘massive and continuous material growth without limits by mindlessly extracting from nature through the harnessing of mega technologies spearheaded by modern nation-states formed through competitive electoral democracy.’
The spirit of enquiry
It is no secret that Gandhi also had disagreements with certain aspects of modern medicine. However, Dr. Sinha cited Mr. Prasad’s article to bring more clarity on Gandhi’s stance on modern as well as traditional medicine and his praise for the spirit of inquiry that modern medicine encapsulated.
The article carried excerpts from Gandhi’s speech at Tibbia college in Delhi in 1921.
“But I have nothing but praise for the zeal, industry, and sacrifice that have animated modern scientists in the pursuit after truth. I regret to have to record my opinion based on considerable experience that our hakims and vaids (ayurvedic practitioners) not exhibit that spirit in any mentionable degree. They follow without question formulas. They carry on little investigation. The condition of indigenous medicine is truly deplorable. Not having kept abreast of modern research, their profession has fallen largely into disrepute,” it reads.
“Gandhi, time and again, asks people to follow scientific methods of experimenting, recording, publishing, discussing with peers, and then bringing suitable changes as per the need of the day,” said Dr. Sinha.
