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Oligarchy or Democracy?
APART from questions of aim and method, a fruitful source of discord between the two
parties has been the divergence of views with regard to the spirit of the
Congress, whether it is to be the Congress of the few or the Congress of the
many. This divergence has been chiefly operative in bringing about struggles
over the election of the President and his method of conducting the proceedings,
over the selection of the Subjects Committee and the rights of the delegates to
express their opinion and use every means to make it operative. One side demands
implicit obedience to the authority of the President and
a
small circle of leaders, the other claims that the President is only
a servant of the Congress with a delegated and limited power, that the Congress
is supreme and no small circle of leaders has a right to dictate to it, and that
the obscurest delegate is by his very position equal in rights and status to the
most distinguished men in the country. One side tries to form a Subjects
Committee of the leading men in each province, the other tries to enforce the
right of the delegates to make their own unhampered choice. One side wishes the
Congress to register obediently the resolutions framed for it by wiser heads,
the other claims a sovereign dignity and activity for the whole body and the
utmost latitude of debate on all important questions. This difference of spirit
has been the cause of even more discord and bitterness than the difference of
aims and methods, and the most difficult and debatable points in the Congress
Constitution will be those into which this issue enters.
In the early days of the world political development was the result of
the needs of the civic organism; in modern times it is powerfully swayed by
ideas, and often the idea creates the need. English education has brought in the
idea of democracy, of the sovereign right and power of the people, and a
predilection for the forms of a democratic assembly. When, therefore, the
Congress was instituted, the originators tried to cast it
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in
the democratic mould, to clothe it in democratic forms. But the idea by itself
cannot become operative, it must first create a corresponding need. The
Congress, therefore, while democratic in theory, was in reality a close
oligarchy of the most primitive type. Claiming to realise in obedience to the
most developed modern ideas the course of modern democratic development, it
really followed in obedience to the actual political conditions of the country a
course of primitive development very like in its essential features to the
primitive constitutions of early times when democracy was unconsciously
evolving. There was no electorate which could make the principle of election
operative, no political vitality or habit of political thought in the people to
put life into the forms of a democratic assembly, no battle of opinions which
could hammer out the complete mould of a great deliberative assembly from the
rough and shapeless mass called the Congress.
Nominally, the Congress was a sort of imitation Parliament and its
delegates were supposed to be elected by the people and representatives of the
people; in reality, there was no electorate to represent and the forms of
election degenerated into a farce; five people often meeting to elect a hundred
out of whom those only attended the Congress session who had time and leisure.
In effect, therefore, the Congress was not a modern Parliament but a popular
assembly like the old Aryan assemblies in which the whole body of the citizens
could attend and all did attend who had the inclination and the leisure. But
while the old Aryan assembly was actually the mustering of the citizens, the
Congress was rather like those early federal assemblies held in a central place
in which as many as could attended from distant places and the bulk of the
gathering was made up of local citizens. The peculiarity of the Congress has
been the failure to provide against the preponderance of the local majority
except by the habit of aiming at unanimity in its resolutions. This flaw in the
foundation has been largely responsible for the final tumbling to pieces of the
structure. Nominally, again, the resolutions of the Congress were passed by the
vote of the assembled delegates, as in a democratic chamber; in reality, the
delegates did not vote at all but, like the primitive assemblies, simply
accepted by acclamation
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resolutions ready prepared for them by a few influential
men sitting in secret council. Nominally, the President was elected by the
Congress and presided over the proceedings according to recognised rules of
debate, but in reality he was chosen out of and by the small oligarchical circle
which ruled the Congress, effected their decisions and carried out their will.
His authority over the proceedings was unfettered by any written rules; the
custom and the precedents of the assembly were the sole guide and these were
interpreted by him according to the convenience of the Congress oligarchs. Thus
the pretence of a modern democratic assembly reduced itself in practice to the
reality of an oligarchy. A small circle meeting in secret called the Congress,
decided its place of meeting, fixed its policy, framed its resolutions, selected
its officers, governed its proceedings and took the opinion of the assembly by
acclamation. The assembly listened to the speakers selected by the oligarchs and
passed by acclamation the resolutions they had framed. The President was simply
a temporary chief of the oligarchs and not the real head of a democratic
assembly. In all these respects the Congress reproduced with extraordinary
fidelity the essential features of a primitive Greek ecclesia or the Roman
comitia in the most oligarchical period.
The first attempt to democratise the Congress was the creation of the
Subjects Committee, as a sort of temporary Senate or Council which should
prepare the business of the Congress. It was an unconscious reproduction of the
Greek boulē
or preliminary Council which had similar functions; but it failed to democratise
the Congress, it only widened the basis of the Congress oligarchy. It was
supposed to be elected by the assembly but was really selected by the oligarchs
whose nominations were accepted by the Congress. The Subjects Committee meetings
were indeed the scene of frequent encounters between the oligarchs and the free
lances who represented a growing strain of popular discontent; but there was no
popular party which these men could set against the prestige of the old leaders,
and they themselves were usually young and ambitious men who soon passed into
the charmed circle and became its chief supports. Those of a robuster type, a
Tilak or a Bepin Pal, were held at arm's length
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and, having no organised following, were unable to
prevail.
Another direction in which the incipient democratic tendency
sought to fulfil itself was in the demand for
a fixed and
written constitutution for the Congress.
Unwritten law administered by a coterie, class or caste, has always been a
strength to oligarchy, and we find in early times that the first demand of an
infant democracy is for the codification of law and a fixed and written
constitution. We have ourselves experienced in the last two years what a
powerful weapon in the hands of the Congress oligarchy has been this absence of
a written constitution, law and procedure for the Congress. The demand for a
written constitution early manifested itself and led for some time to an actual
secession of a whole Province from the Congress, but the privilege of
administering the body without fixed or written restrictions was too highly
valued by the official clique to be lightly parted with, and by procrastination
and masterly inaction they succeeded in baffling the growing demand.
To democratise the Congress was, in fact, impossible without a popular
awakening and widening of the political consciousness. Democracy is impossible
without a demos, a people politically awake and active, and it was only in the
upheaval of 1905 that the rudiments of such a demos began to form. The
Nationalist Party which sprang out of that upheaval, showed its character by the
democratic nature of its demands and the increasing tendency to democracy in its
own composition. It demanded that the President should be elected according to
popular sentiment and not by a coterie, that the Subjects Committee should be
elected in due form and not nominated by a coterie, that the President and the
Congress official circles should act constitutionally and not at their caprice
or convenience, that the constitution should be reduced to writing, that the
full assembly of delegates should be in fact as well as in theory the sovereign
body and that the rights of discussion, amendment and rejection of resolutions
should be allowed to be put in practice. In brief, they claimed that the
theoretically democratic Congress should become democratic in effect and
reality. The keenness of the struggle not only in the Congress but outside it
has been largely if not principally due to this onslaught on the charmed oligar-
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chical
circle and the determination of the latter to preserve their position at any
cost. At Midnapur, for instance, the struggle was over this issue, and not over
any serious difference of opinion. And though the issue at Surat was much larger
and complicated, it is significant that the battle was joined over a question of
constitutional procedure, and it was on a claim of the official oligarchy to
override the constitutional rights of a delegate that the Surat Congress broke
up in admired disorder. Oligarchy or democracy, authority or freedom are the
issue, and no settlement can work which does not decide the question whether the
Congress is to remain a mute assembly swayed by a handful of men or a democratic
body of as modern a development as the political conditions of the country will
allow.
Bande
Mataram,
March 25, 1908
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