The Fundamental Rights Resolution: Nationalism, Internationalism and Cosmopolitanism in an Interwar Moment Kama Maclean University of New South Wales, Sydney [email protected] Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 37, 2, August 2017. This is a preproduction version (ie, Author’s Version). If you wish to cite this paper, please cite the published version (ie the Version of Record), from http://cssaame.dukejournals.org/content/ Abstract This paper responds to the analytical threads offered by Partha Chatterjee’s ‘Nationalism, Internationalism and Cosmopolitanism: Some observations from Indian History’, by focusing closely on the dynamics leading to the passing of the Fundamental Rights resolution by the Indian National Congress at Karachi in 1931. A key moment in anti- colonial thought, the resolution was many things: an uneasy fusion of ideologies to assuage a range of divergent political interests; a manoeuvre to prevent another split of the nationalist movement into radical and moderate factions; a gesture toward performing statehood; and a multi-authored but significant imagining of what an independent India might look like. An ostensibly nationalist document, the resolution – elements of which remain in the statement of rights in the Indian Constitution – demonstrates the influence of leftist internationalism and liberal cosmopolitan concerns in utopian interwar imaginings. Keywords: Fundamental Rights, Karachi Congress, M.K. Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, M.N. Roy 1 In his broad-ranging paper, Partha Chatterjee explores the entanglement of nationalist, internationalist and cosmopolitan thinking in India in the early twentieth century. I want to add to his discussion of these influences by focussing on a moment in the interwar period, in which a leftist internationalism was woven into a set of nationalist discourses that sought to appropriate and displace colonial liberalism. That moment is the passing of the Fundamental Rights Resolution by the Indian National Congress at its annual session, held in late March, 1931 at Karachi. The Fundamental Rights Resolution remains a significant document, for it laid out some of the directive principles that were later incorporated into the Constitution in post-colonial India.1 While many of these remain elusive in contemporary India, they form the touchstone from which rights can be demanded from the nation-state. Given Chatterjee’s own focus on the global discourse of rights, first via the limited liberal discourses of empire, and later with the development of universal human rights as a cosmopolitan solution to a new world order, this focus seems appropriate. Very little scholarship has addressed the meaning and significance of the Fundamental Rights Resolution; when it is briefly acknowledged, it is generally passed over in favour of discussion of the more enduring Indian Constitution. Pertinent to the present discussion is an intervention from Arvind Elangovan, who argues for a need to relax the frameworks that have read the Indian Constitution as ‘strictly a product of nationalism’, and from Javed Majeed, who has recently drawn out the constitution’s cosmopolitan influences. 2 In addition to highlighting Chatterjee’s provocation, then, the present discussion provides historical depth and ideological texture to the imagination of rights in a colonial context. By demonstrating the mutual imbrication of internationalism and cosmopolitanism in the formation of a nationalist imaginary in the twentieth-century, Chatterjee’s thinkpiece highlights the destabilisation of nationalist frameworks in recent South Asian historiography. His intervention advances a trend in South Asian studies toward a more complex understanding of nationalist activity, which acknowledges diverse ideological influences and drivers of political thought in the early twentieth century, demonstrating the dynamics between an organised activism that was explicitly 1 Habib, ‘The Envisioning of a Nation’, 26. 2 Elangovan, ‘The Making of the Indian Constitution’, 5; Majeed, ‘“A Nation on the Move”, 237-253. 2 nationalist, and an anti-colonial, revolutionary politics that imagined a post-nation state order. Studies written in the decades after decolonisation tended to conflate a range of political activities that challenged the colonial state under the rubric of nationalism, suggesting that the normalisation of the nation-state system between the wars has made other futures difficult to think. The recent turn towards intellectual, diasporic and transnational histories in South Asian Studies has no doubt contributed to this shift towards anti-colonialism over nationalism, as has a renewed interest in biography.3 These trends have collectively complicated neat trajectories of political thought, which has in turn opened up spaces for re-examining the messy entanglements of ideologies which informed nationalist imaginations. These historiographical developments, along with the relaxing of institutional or political constraints on access to source materials, are beginning to challenge long-held orthodoxies and reverse the tendency to read all political activity as essentially nationalist. The passing of the Fundamental Rights Resolution in 1931 highlights many of these dynamics; in particular, the degree to which the left in India has been marginalised by a hagiographical nationalism. This is perhaps a product of post-colonial teleologies funded by Congress governments; but it is also an outcome of the diversity of and divisions within the left in India. The development of Marxist thought in India was closely impacted by a combination of political and ideological pressures from the Government and from the communist movement, as Chatterjee describes in his discussion of the various conspiracy cases (specifically, in Cawnpore and Meerut); the diktats of the Comintern (to work in a united front with, or to oppose bourgeois nationalist parties such as the Indian National Congress); and the fissures that followed in the wake of Stalinisation (which impacted the careers of key Indian activists, including M. N. Roy). And yet the imprint of Marxism on nationalist thinking was substantial, given the Comintern’s second period strategy to influence or capture nationalist organisations, which in India endured well beyond the transition to third period policies (1928-1935), which declared a withdrawal from cooperation with nationalists.4 3 Chaturvedi, ‘Writing History in the Borderlands’, 313. 4 Seth, Marxist Theory and Nationalist Politics, 133. 3 The Fundamental Rights Resolution presents a case in point; as a visionary tract, which locates economic rights as a key element of substantive rights, its authorship has been generally credited to M. K. Gandhi and/or Jawaharlal Nehru. The document appears in the official government-published compilations of the Collected Works Mahatma Gandhi (where the editors concede that it was ‘presumably written by Gandhi’) and the Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru (in which the editor notes it was ‘drafted by Jawaharlal with changes by Mahatma Gandhi’).5 While both men were clearly prominent in editing the document and pushing it through the committees of Congress to its final state, their indebtedness to the left has been less clear; or alternatively, Jawaharlal is presumed to represent the nascent socialist wing within the Congress, a manoeuvre which substantially flattens the diversity of Indian left. In his autobiography, Nehru was defensive about the authorship of the resolution, denying rumours that the maverick communist M. N. Roy ‘drew up this resolution, or the greater part of it, and thrust it down upon me at Karachi’. 6 Nehru’s disclaimer aside, the Fundamental Rights Resolution can be read as a palimpsest originating from M. N. Roy, who by 1931, was isolated from Moscow, labelled a traitor and stripped of the title ‘comrade’ following Stalin’s bolshevisation of the Communist Party.7 Roy’s expulsion by the third international in 1929, as well as his fluctuating relationship with mainstream nationalism in India over the course of his long career renders him somewhat elusive to political definition.8 The passing of the Fundamental Rights Resolution in 1931 represented an important moment for the Congress, the broad movement credited with leading the anticolonial struggle in British India, because it heralded a compromise among a range of ideologies – liberal, nationalist and socialist – that were reflected in the resolution.9 These three have obvious resonances with Chatterjee’s triad. The Resolution comprised a twenty-point statement of aspirations, with a liberal discourse of rights set out in its beginning, pledging a range of freedoms and equality to all citizens, across caste, religion and gender. It laid out a socialist agenda, mainly stating the need 5 Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi [CWMG], Vol. 45, 370; and Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru [SWJN], Vol. 4, 511. 6 Nehru, Toward Freedom, 197. 7 Manjapra, M. N. Roy, 86-88. 8 Huacuja Alonso, ‘M. N. Roy in Revolutionary Mexico’. 9 ‘The Resolution on Fundamental Rights and Economic Changes’, March 31, 1931. Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi [CWMG], 45, 372. 4 for regulating labour conditions, abolishing serfdom and child labour, but also asserting the state’s control of large industries; as well as a suite of classically nationalist elements. Some of these demands reflected a longstanding economic nationalism, hearkening back to the late nineteenth century speeches and writings of Dadabhai Naoroji (reductions