The Force of Resistance: The Place of Coercion in Democratic Power


• In Event: Revolution, Resistance, and the State

Abstract

This paper seeks to highlight the place of force (as well as coercion and violence) within understandings of democratic power. Scholarship ranging from the work of John Dewey and Jane Mansbridge through to Karuna Mantena and Alex Livingston allows a consideration of the complex aspects of coercion, and of the inevitable presence of coercion in political life and in democratic decision-making. Drawing on that work, and one notions of social imaginaries and multiple modernities, the proposed paper will interrogate the conception of force that emerges in forms political action witnessed in colonial India. The aim thereby is to provide some analytical notes on the culture of Indian democracy, and on the insights therein for forms of democratic political action involving physical co-presence.

Thomas Hansen (2019) claims that India’s democratic processes are characterised by a coming to the fore of the ‘law of force’ at the cost of the ‘force of law.’ Further, even though different modern Indian thinkers have advanced arguments for non-violence and for the rule of law, these ideas seem to have been undermined by an emphasis on the powers of the people for resistance to, and the breaking of, (colonial) law. And sometimes these acts were seen as the exercise of soul force. Did the importance in anti-colonial mobilisations of public resistance to the (colonial) state undercut the space for liberalism in the modern Indian social imaginary? Further, could it be that the skepticism toward state power of thinkers like MK Gandhi, and a prioritisation of the collective powers of the people, have normalised, as Hansen says, the breaking of the law, and even rendered it normatively admissible? The place of force in the constitution of the modern social imaginary of India, then, requires interrogation, even as the Indian anti-colonial struggle is associated with a call to non-violence. I will conduct this interrogation by analysing (i) the Banaras house tax sit-in of 1810 and (ii) the Gandhian non-cooperation movement of 1920-22. Both movements involved an exercise of the powers of the people, and allow for a consideration of what is at stake in phenomena involving the physical co-presence of persons, and of the kinds of force exerted by them via concerted action. The aim will be to revisit the connections between force, people’s power and democracy, and about the values in conflict therein.

Author

• Rinku Lamba, National Law School of India University