The Village Republic and the Sink of Localism

On 4 November 1948, while introducing the draft Constitution in the Constituent Assembly, B R Ambedkar described the Indian village as a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow mindedness and communalism. He added that he was glad the draft had taken the individual as its unit and not the village. The remark was a rebuke to a vision that many members, and the leader who had inspired them, held dear. Members such as Shibban Lal Saxena and H V Kamath rose to disagree in the days that followed. The Constitution makers settled on a compromise, giving the village a place among the Directive Principles and not at the centre of the document, and the argument has run in one form or another ever since.

Gandhi's picture was the opposite. In Hind Swaraj, written in 1909, he had criticised the machinery of the modern state, and in 1946 he wrote that independence must begin at the bottom, so that every village would be a republic with full powers. For him the village was a moral unit, small enough for face to face accountability, where people could govern themselves without a distance between rulers and ruled. Many nationalists shared the sentiment, partly as a reaction to colonial centralisation and partly because British observers such as Charles Metcalfe, in the early nineteenth century, had described village communities as little republics. The image of an ancient self governing village had entered the nationalist imagination, whatever the historical record might say.