“In the Name of Politics”: Democracy and the Power of the Multitude in India

Dipesh Chakrabarty

The first of the great operations of discipline is [to] . . . transform the confused, useless or dangerous multitudes into ordered multiplicities.

— Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish

“To take part in demonstrations and hooliganism in the name of politics,” said Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India, speaking to a group of college students in the city of Patna in Bihar on August 30, 1955, “is, apart from the right or wrong of it, not proper for students of any country.”1 A minor conflict between the students of the B. N. College, Patna, and the State Transport employees had led to police firing on the students on August 12 – 13, 1955. Then the Independence Day celebrations on August 15 were marred by “desecration of the National Flag, students-police clashes and black flag demonstration in Chhapra, Biharsharif, Daltonganj, and Nawada.”2 Nehru had gone to Patna to assess the situation. In retrospect, it is possible to read Nehru’s speech as addressing a question that would be important for postcolonial India: what kind of political behavior would be appropriate for the citizens of an independent nation? Nehru’s expression “in the name of politics” suggests that he did not see demonstrations and hooliganism as politics appropriate for students.

Nehru deplored the police action: “It is obvious that any incident that warrants firing is bound to be deplorable.” But he could not tolerate the violence and the trampling of the national flag. Violence in public life was something he saw as a sign of political immaturity: “I cannot tolerate this at all. Is India a nation of immature, childish people? . . . We must behave like an adult, mature, independent nation.” Students must have interrupted his talk at this point, for the speech reads, “Shouting and creating chaos will get you nowhere. I represent a mature nation. How can I have any respect for your intelligence . . . if the students in this town do not have the patience to listen to me?”3 In another speech made at a public meeting in Guwahati, Assam, a few days earlier, Nehru had already made this point:

No strong nation indulges in throwing stones and behaving like hooligans. Any fool can do that. . . . But why should an incident in Patna set off a conflagration all over Bihar, with trains being burnt and attacks on police and the railway officials and what not? The whole thing started with a small incident on a bus. Our students, particularly in Bihar, consider it beneath their dignity to buy tickets on buses or trains. What kind of a country are we building?4

Nehru was not against students taking an interest in political matters. Such interest was part of the process that would make them into citizens: “You have the right to belong to any political party that you choose. But one development which is wrong is the increasing interference of political parties in universities and colleges, generating great tension. . . . I do not say that you should not take part in politics. As citizens you must think about these things. But you must keep them out of universities and colleges.” Violence could not be a part of democracy: “We have democracy in India. . . . We cannot get anywhere by beating up one another or breaking the laws.” Politics in democracy must be based on discussions, debates, and discipline. Nehru continued: “The most crucial thing at this juncture is unity and discipline.” He added: “The moment we allow ourselves to behave like hooligans, we will lose control over ourselves. . . . The reins [of public life] then pass into the hands of goondas, the lawless elements.”5

Yet, in spite of his aversion to the violence of student action, Nehru could not help but notice that what the students in Bihar had done was not totally unfamiliar to him. Their actions were reminiscent of the anti-British nationalist movement of the pre-independence period. He conceded that the violence and indiscipline he regarded as improper to politics after independence could be “the lot of students only in countries under foreign rule.” It was somehow acceptable when students of a country under foreign rule resorted to them. But they were “not the sign of a free nation.” He challenged his audience: “You can find out if such things happen in Great Britain, America, Soviet Union, Germany, Japan, China or any other country.” 6Indeed, on other occasions also in the 1950s, Nehru insisted on there being a real difference between the political methods used to achieve independence and the political methods suitable for an independent democratic country. Mentioning the agitation by Sikh leaders for the creation of a separate Punjabi subah (province), Nehru once again pointed to the obsolete nature of their political methods. Referring directly to the Gandhian technique of satyagraha, Nehru said:

I cannot say that nobody should ever do satyagraha. It is possible that it may be necessary sometimes. But to go on hunger-strike or undertake satyagraha over day-to-day problems, whether it is a political problem or an industrial or labour dispute, is absolutely wrong. I want you to realize that it weakens us politically. . . . This is worth considering because an independent nation which is advancing, and is no longer immature, has to adopt different methods of working. We must give up these ways. . . . Whatever it is, why don’t we talk? . . . Are we going to start a civil war in the country? That is absurd.7

He went on to mention a strike in Kanpur: “A strike has been going on in the factories of Kanpur for the last two months or so. It has excited a great deal of passion. I feel that the time is gone when we could solve our problems in this way in India or anywhere else.”8

Now, why was it that practices that were judged acceptable as political methods in colonial India — defying the law, staging satyagraha, even destroying public property, and so on — were no longer an appropriate language for politics in the postcolonial period, at least in Nehru’s view? I do not think the distinction Nehru drew between politics appropriate for fighting foreign rule and politics appropriate for a democratic and sovereign India was merely a self-serving one. He had a point. Could one create postcolonial politics from the political repertoire and techniques of anticolonial movements? This was the critical question that, in effect, was raised by Nehru. Both the violent and the nonviolent methods of political agitation used during British rule were, after all, techniques of challenging the sovereignty of the British in India. Breaking the law was central to Gandhian nationalism. Now that India was a postcolonial, independent state based on the democratic principle of representation through universal adult franchise, actions that called into question that sovereignty of the new state were necessarily illegitimate in the eyes of Nehru. In his speech to the students in Patna, he castigated the Communist Party of India — whose student followers, he suspected, were involved in insulting the national flag — for insisting “that India was still a colonial country.” 9Politics, for Nehru, had become a question of negotiating the day-to-day problems of development: “The problems facing the country are mainly economic and in a sense the biggest issue is the Five Year Plan.”10 Crowd action was no longer political in Nehru’s reckoning; it was merely an act of hooliganism carried out in the name of politics. As he put it to the students in Patna: “Now how do you think we can solve India’s problems except through discipline?”11 The question was rhetorical, for Nehru had himself supplied the answer in an earlier moment in the speech: “We must try to solve our problems through discussion.”12

The very transition from the colonial to the postcolonial state in India thus raised in turn important questions about Indian political life: What would constitute the limits of the political in independent, democratic India? How would politics in the country reflect in everyday life the idea of the popular sovereignty that underlay the parliamentary form of the government and that was enacted in the five-yearly ritual of universal adult franchise? Nehru even looked forward to a certain kind of diminution of the role of politics in national life: “In today’s world, an engineer has more value than an officer sitting in the secretariat. Similarly, . . . scientists are more valuable than our ministers.”13 “I am fed up of [sic] politics,” he said in a public speech in Chandigarh in 1955.14 It was as if politics should end with the attainment of independence. Whatever remained of politics should be harnessed in the interest of development: “My entire life has been spent in politics and even now I have to give most of my time to it. . . . Ultimately, however, the real problem in front of us is the economic progress of India.”15 One could also read into Nehru’s statements the idea that, on the attainment of independence, something like a sphere of “everyday politics,” where politics was part of the routine and process of development, should emerge in India: “The behaviour of a free and independent nation is always different. It is not the way of constant friction and tension as in the days of British rule.”16

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Notes

An earlier version of this essay, originally presented at a conference titled “From the Colonial to the Postcolonial: South Asia in Transition,” held at the University of Chicago in April 2005, was published in Economic and Political Weekly, July 23 – 29, 2005. In revising it, I have benefited from comments by Thomas Hansen, Claudio Lomnitz, Lauren Berlant, Pranab Bardhan, Anthony Low, Dilip Gaonkar, and Rochona Majumdar. Thanks to Dwaipayan Sen and Sunit Singh for assistance with research.

1. Jawaharlal Nehru, “Students and Discipline,” in Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru [hereafter SWJN], ed. S. Gopal (New Delhi: Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Fund, 1984 – ), 29:83; emphasis added.
2. Nehru, “Students and Discipline,” 29:47n.
3. Nehru, “Students and Discipline,” 29:70 – 72.
4. Nehru, “Peaceful Path to Progress,” SWJN, 29:57.
5. Nehru, “Students and Discipline,” 29:74, 78.
6. Nehru, “Students and Discipline,” 29:83.
7. Nehru, “Policy of India,” SWJN, 29:22 – 23.
8. Nehru, “Policy of India,” 29:23 – 24.
9. Nehru, “Students and Discipline,” 29:72.
10. Nehru, “Tasks Ahead,” SWJN, 29:7.
11. Nehru, “Students and Discipline,” 29:74.
12. Nehru, “Tasks Ahead,” 29:7.
13. Nehru, “Hard Work for Building a New India,” SWJN, 28:19.
14. Nehru, “Chandigarh: A Symbol of Planned Development,” SWJN, 28:33.
15. Nehru, “Chandigarh,” 33.
16. Nehru, “Peaceful Path to Progress,” 29:55.