Constitutions and the Social Questions: Arendt, Ambedkar, and the limits of Political Theory
01-13-2014
“[T]o the extent that they had a positive notion of freedom which would transcend the idea of a successful liberation from tyrants and from necessity, this notion was identified with the act of foundation, that is, the framing of a constitution.”
-Hannah Arendt, "On Revolution"
The year just gone by marked the centenary of B.R. Ambedkar, the chairman of the drafting committee of the Indian Constitution, often referred to as the ‘father of the Indian Constitution’, even though it was a claim of paternity that he vigorously rejected in later years (for reasons we shall soon get to). Ambedkar is a remarkable, and in some ways paradoxical member of that exclusive club of great constitutional founders. The significance of his influence in the framing of the Indian Constitution is incontrovertible. Yet, he was in many ways an outsider to the class of political elites that assumed power at the moment of India’s independence from British colonial rule. Politically, he remained an opponent of the Congress Party, the party that dominated the anticolonial struggle as well as the postcolonial government for decades. More significantly, his status as an outsider was marked most starkly by him being a Dalit, an “untouchable” from one of the lowest rungs of India’s caste hierarchy. Unlike most of the members of the Constituent Assembly, Ambedkar experienced in his own life the degrading and dehumanizing aspects of caste oppression, and devoted his public life to the cause of eradicating the caste system. As an outsider in this double sense, both in terms of his opposition to the dominant political party, and hailing from the most marginalized and oppressed sections of the society, the story of Ambedkar’s relationship to the Constitution illuminate certain paradoxes of new beginnings that only those at the margins can illuminate.
Let us return to Arendt’s quote. There are three elements in the quote that reflect themes that run through "On Revolution." First, one finds here an elaboration of two concepts that engaged her for much of her life: freedom and beginnings, from an explicitly political standpoint. Freedom, as a political concept, is understood as the collective capacity of human beings to create a new political reality. Emerging in moments of revolution, what marks this political freedom is its ability to institute, to create a new and secure public space. It gives political actors the ability to author their own political world. It is, in that sense, world-making.
The quote then identifies this world-making act in a particular form – that of “framing of a constitution”. The fulfillment of the promise of freedom generated by the revolutionary moment is the making of a new constitution. What political freedom brings forth then is something specific – new institutions and constitutional structures, which acts as bricks and mortars for the new world that has been created, and creates the concrete space where freedom can become a political reality, and not an abstract concept. Lastly, it names ‘tyranny’ and ‘necessity’ as the two conditions from which freedom is marked, a point which we will return to later.
Ambedkar’s participation – especially in a central capacity as the Chairman of the Drafting Committee – in the making of the Indian Constitution was in itself an interesting fact. As a consistent opponent of the Congress, especially its leader M.K. Gandhi, and as one who was deeply weary of the upper caste leadership of the Congress, one can wonder why he accepted the position offered to him. One possible answer that could be gleaned from his extensive interventions during the constituent assembly debates is a cautious hope that the Constitution would succeed in creating a new institutional structure that could ameliorate, and even eliminate, the most pervasive forms of unfreedom experienced by Indians. That a constitution would succeed in not merely marking India’s liberation from colonial rule, but in creating a new political world free from the hierarchies and dominations of the past.
Ambedkar’s belief in the significance of this new possibility was evident in an extraordinary speech he made at the floor of the assembly, whereby he laid out a strong case as to why after the commencement of the constitution extra-constitutional political actions should be delegitimized. Now that free India has a constitution of its own, written and instituted in the name of “We the People”, extra-constitutional political mobilizations should be replaced with contestations through constitutional paths. This argument is especially significant given that one of those ‘extra-constitutional’ forms of actions Ambedkar mentioned in this speech was the Gandhian method of civil disobedience that had garnered wide prevalence during the struggle against colonial rule.
Here we see a distance developing between Arendt and Ambedkar. Arendt despite the importance she accorded to domesticating the revolution through creation of institutions, remained skeptical of constitutional law emerging as the only acceptable language of political action. In ‘On Revolution’ itself she goes on to ask, in an uneasy tone, “if the end of revolution and the introduction of constitutional government spelled the end of public freedom, was it then desirable to end the revolution?” The moment of constitution making was identified by Arendt with the notion of a “positive idea of freedom” not in a transcendental but an immanent way. What made it special was not simply the institution of some higher order value system, but that it was a sublime expression of creative political act – a political world making par excellence. The freedom inheres not in the ideal form of ‘a constitution’, but in the act of constituting, which reveals the essential human agency for self-reflexively creating the world that one inhabits.
The resuscitation of this creative agency was at the heart of Arendt’s political thought. In the landscape of mid-twentieth century, in an increasingly bureaucratized space of human existence where collective action became dictated by the rationale of ‘necessity’ and the ‘tyranny’ of governmentalized calculations, Arendt sought in politics a space where human beings could collective reclaim their ability to make their own world from which they have been alienated. To this end (as Hanna Pitkin has pointed out) sets of binaries emerge in her work – freedom is contrasted with necessity, action with behavior, polis with oikos, and politics with ‘the social’.
She sought to recover that space, marked by the first half of those binaries, through thinking, speech and action in concert in the public realm. It was based on mutuality and reciprocity – captured in her well-known discussion of the faculty of ‘promising’ – conducted amongst human beings who spoke and acted towards each other as equals political beings. These words and deeds, properly political in nature, produced and maintained the space for freedom against ‘tyranny’ and ‘necessities’. She refused to seek foundation for this space in something outside of those words and deeds – either in a sovereign will, or in some form of desirable social condition achieved via analysis and transformation of social relations. The space was produced and maintained through the continual act of producing and maintaining it.
The most significant aspect of the ‘revolution’ that precedes the constitution – as Arendt showed through her stylized reconstruction of the American revolutionary experience – was therefore not any pure claim to an absolute break or fundamental change of a socio-economic fact, but the creation of a condition where human beings can collectively come together to self-reflexively create author their own political world. This was the great good fortune of the American revolutionaries that Arendt talked about. They had through their lived experience and associational forms generated the necessary praxis for this form of speech and action much before the revolutionary event or the constitutional moment came about. The condition for the realization of freedom in America according to Arendt was, as Bonnie Honig writes, “brought into being avant la lettre” so to speak. In that instance, the letters of the constitution reveal, express and institutionalize something whose conditions in a conceptual form was already conceived. The birth could not happen without conception.
One can say that for Arendt it created a space for political theory free from both political theology and social analysis. The constitution is the supreme achievement borne out of such a theory in praxis.
What was Ambedkar’s assessment of the possibility for such an achievement in India? In his concluding speech, he noted what he called the ‘contradictions’ inherent to the process of making a constitution. “On the 26th of January [the day the Constitution was adopted] we are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics we shall be recognizing the principle of one man, one vote, one value. In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of economic structure continue to deny [this principle]. How long shall we continue to live this life of contradiction? If we continue to deny it for long, we will do so by putting our democracy in peril.” Note the foreboding tone of the last line. Ambedkar here is not voicing a simple discomfort about the existence of inequities in the Indian social life. Rather, he voices a far deeper concern about the limits of political theory to accomplish the work of creating a space where freedom “is not a concept but a living reality” without the attendant work of social transformation. Despite the extraordinary achievement of liberation from colonial rule, and the constituting of a polity with full political rights, Ambedkar suggests that the path of becoming republican citizens, for Indians, cannot run through the terrain of political theory alone and eschew the treacherous field of social theory. One cannot meaningfully talk about the sphere of freedom without also at the same time dealing with the sphere of necessity – not because one shouldn’t, but because one cannot. Dealing with only one only ends up generating a “contradiction’ that would imperil the whole project. Given this predicament, the endeavor of making a constitution for India had to concern itself with the social question – with “necessities” – which Ambedkar supported. Nevertheless, in the subsequent years after the constitution was brought in force he became increasingly weary of the potential of the constitution-making project to create any meaningful condition of freedom for the people of India. As the preeminent leader of those who were the most marginalized in the Indian society, he was acutely aware of this limitation. In 1953, only three years after the Constitution came into force, he remarked: “My friends tell me that I have made the Constitution. But I am quiet prepared to say that I shall be the first person to burn it out.” It was a spectacular act of renunciation from a man still referred to as the father of the Indian Constitution. This renunciation, it must be underlined, was not of the nature of a Jeffersonian demand for generational renewal of the revolutionary moment. It was not a lament about the extinguishing of the revolutionary flame. Rather, it was an expression of the frustration with a social revolution that never happened, and the related disavowal of the faith he once held in the constituent moment to truly birth a new political reality.
The question worth thinking through here is not just about the specificities of the Indian history. Rather, it concerns the nature of political theory itself, and the enduring question that Arendt took as the central concern of that theoretical endeavor – freedom. In the context of the late twentieth century landscape, and what she took to be alienating and fatal encroachment of the ‘social question’ on the sphere of human collective action, Arendt was unwilling to ground her conception of freedom – and of politics – on an analysis of social conditions under which human beings live. Her response to the challenges of twentieth century political life was to draw upon the experience of late eighteenth century colonists who, in Tocqueville’s phrase, were ‘born equal’ rather than having to become so. The horizontal practice of concerted action and mutual promises, harnessed in town halls and churches, could show a way towards creating a space for practicing and theorizing politics free from the clutches of necessity, and its attendant social analysis and calculus. The supreme achievement of that late eighteenth century moment – making of the constitution – provided a template for a political and reflexive collective world making act, free from the technocratic calculus of social transformation. Yet Ambedkar’s own journey – as the preeminent constitution maker coming from the margins of the Indian ‘social’ as Arendt would call it – and its tragic denouement demonstrates the limits of that vision. It shows that in creating the space for agonistic political freedom, one cannot ignore the weapons being wielded through social power. Countering those weapons requires analyzing and addressing the condition that produces them. Finding the theory and praxis for such a move, without retreating into a technocratic calculus, remains the challenge for contemporary political thought, as much for our time as it was for Arendt’s.
-Sandipto Dasgupta, Lecturer in Social Studies, Harvard University