Political Community in a Plural Society: Reflections from India

Gurpreet Mahajan will open the panel with a paper that treats political community through the lens of republican political philosophy, before going on to discuss the striking case of India, still beyond the horizons of most political philosophers today. She begins with an overview of how the concept of political community has been handled in the republican tradition, arguing that the Aristotelian model implies a simultaneous realization of supreme political authority and of the principle that this authority should work for the common good. This is, Mahajan argues, what is missing in the otherwise powerful accounts of political sovereignty in Hobbes and Locke. It is in Rousseau and then Hegel that Mahajan finds compelling accounts of how political participation might give rise to the common good that republicans find wanting in liberalism. Such accounts, however, did not anticipate the staggering diversity that characterized India in the moment of Independence. Mahajan reflects on the claim-making in the Constituent Assembly that gave rise to the Constitution of India, in which difference is registered but not with regard to political representation. The Constituent Assembly also gave rise to a powerful myth, that all the “communities” in India were somehow involved in drafting the Constitution. This myth still underwrites the commitment to the Indian state of an extraordinary range of political actors. Yet Mahajan feels that political participation is failing to produce enough of a common vision to overcome the vote-bank politics and cultural nationalism that, in India today, violate republican tenets and fragment political authority. The idea of “one people” is therefore under siege from the forces of nationalism on the one hand, and from centralized state authority on the other.