Whose Swaraj?

Had our freedom fighters enjoyed – and had anachronistic access to – classic rock instead of Hindustani ragas and European chamber music, I’m Free by The Who (1969) would have been a fitting jam to blare on the scratchy gramophones of 1947:

I’m free, I’m free/

And freedom tastes of reality/

I’m free, I’m free/

And I’m waiting for you to follow me

Freedom, in this era, was often articulated through the concept of swaraj, thanks largely to the Indian National Congress’ 1929 demand for poorna swaraj, or unqualified independence. But the idea dated far back to the 1870s, with the reformist Hindu writings of Swami Dayanand Saraswati, later politicised by Bal Gangadhar Tilak. By the first decades of the 20th century, Indians as ideologically diverse as Gandhi (who published Hind Swaraj in 1909), Tagore (Ghare Baire, 1916), Savarkar (Hindutva, 1923), K.C. Bhattacharya (Swaraj in Ideas, 1928), and Golwalkar (We, or Our Nationhood Defined, 1939), were all positing competing visions of swaraj. By the mid-1930s, the idea of swaraj – whatever it meant exactly – was so prevalent that the distantly-anticipated future Constitution of a free and independent India was quite routinely referred to as the ‘Swaraj Constitution’.

The association of independence with swaraj was, however, rather suspect to many who did not fall within the various nationalist camps. For Ambedkar, the spiritualisation of the concept and its Hindu majoritarian undertones were problematic. Whose freedom, whose swaraj would be won, Ambedkar wondered, as long as the nationalist movement remained ideologically pegged to Brahmanical Hinduism? As he captured it succinctly: “Swaraj would be the substitution of domination by the British for domination by the Hindus. Without ensuring protection of all their rights, in a free India, Dalits would not be free. Swaraj meant Hindu Raj”.

This fear in mind, Ambedkar once quipped, “If Tilak had been born amongst the untouchables, he would not have raised the slogan ‘swaraj is my birthright’, but rather the slogan, ‘annihilation of caste is my birthright’.” So, it would seem fair to ask, whose birthright is swaraj?

When, in 2012, Arvind Kejriwal decided to publish his own political manifesto, enticingly titling it Swaraj, his answer to that question was: the citizen. He thus proposed a system of governance where power devolved down to citizens, decision-making done at the local level. As embarrassing as such an idea sounds to us a decade later, a decade that witnessed a quantum leap in the centralisation of power through techniques of surveillance and ‘governance’ (from mandatory Aadhaar, fintech and digital rupees to Aarogya Setu and God-knows-what-comes-next), the deepest error of Kejriwal’s reply to Ambedkar’s question was not its naivety regarding power, but its utter silence on the question of caste. That word is almost totally absent from Kejriwal’s Swaraj.

A little-known book from 1930 by J E Ellam, Secretary of the Mahabodhi Society, also titled Swaraj, provides stark contrast with not only Kejriwal’s Swaraj, but also with that of nearly all of Ellam’s Indian nationalist contemporaries. He wrote: “I have dwelt at length on the question of caste, and I will come back to it again, because it is of crucial importance to the question of swaraj. To understand a people, it is necessary to understand their philosophy of life. Caste is the key to the whole problem in India.”

For Ambedkar, freedom for all citizens, if that was what swaraj claimed to promote, would have to be preconditioned upon the emancipation of Dalits, or Dalit Swaraj. Dalit Swaraj was not just a precondition for swaraj, or Indian independence; rather, it was the measure of swaraj as such. As long as the marginalised remained on the margins, swaraj would not have been achieved — even if the country were independent.

Despite his differences with Ambedkar over the caste question, even for Gandhi, independence was not measured by freedom from foreign rule, mere national self-determination, and territorial integrity. He did not go as far as Swami Dayanand and claim that “Swaraj is the highest bliss”, but he did expect that the promise of swaraj entailed much more than subjection to the sovereign State.

If I told you what it takes/
To reach the highest high,

You’d laugh and say
‘nothing’s that simple’/

But you’ve been told
many times before/

Messiahs pointed to the door/

And no one had the guts to
leave the temple!/

I’m free, I’m free/

And freedom tastes of reality.

Or so claims The Who. But does the current reality taste of freedom?