Representation and Party Politics in India, 1940-75

• In Event: Reimagining Democracy through Comparative Democratic Theory

Abstract

Through the middle decades of the twentieth century, the mass political party emerged as one of the central institutions of the Indian anti-colonial national movement. For both the Indian National Congress (INC) and its critics, the political party provided an electoral mechanism to achieve mass mobilization, political education, and just parliamentary representation. The goal of this paper is to recover the myriad ways that the link between political parties and representation was theorized in India between the early 1940s and the mid-1970s, from the late colonial period to the first quarter-century of formal independence. I first discuss competing views of the mass party held by three organizations: the Indian National Congress (INC), the Socialist Party of India (SPI), and the Scheduled Castes Federation (SCF). I then discuss attempts to construct forms of “party-less democracy” by three anti-colonial leaders: M.N. Roy, M.K. Gandhi, and Jayaprakash Narayan. Based on this analysis, the paper demonstrates the existence of “anti-party” political discourse as an important – though overlooked – element of Indian thinking on political representation in the twentieth century.

Author

• Tejas Parasher, University of California, Los Angeles