The Pedagogical Account of Parliamentarism at India’s Founding

Udit Bhatia

doi:10.1111/ajps.12768

The Pedagogical Account of Parliamentarism at India’s Founding

Udit Bhatia

Politics

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Abstract

This article explores a distinctive approach to parliamentarism advanced by key figures from India’s founding period in response to their anxieties about concerns about the masses’ backwardness alongside a commitment to democratic self-rule. Both these orientations, one democratic and the other, suspicious of the peoples’ political capacities, existed alongside each other in tension, generating a dilemma: how could the seemingly backward masses facilitate the overthrow of their backwardness in a democratic process? The thinkers studied in this article responded, I argue, with a pedagogical conception of parliamentarism, which viewed parliament and legislators as bearing the function of preparing the masses for democratic citizenship. Their approach represented a critical departure from the ideal of a deliberative legislative assembly at the apex of the law-making process, while avoiding strategies of exclusion historically associated with parliamentarism.

Original language	English
Number of pages	13
Journal	American Journal of Political Science
Early online date	3 Feb 2023
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12768
Publication status	E-pub ahead of print - 3 Feb 2023

Bibliographical note

Keywords

Democratic theory
Parliamentarism
Postcolonial Democracy

Access to Document

10.1111/ajps.12768Licence: CC BY

American J Political Sci - 2023 - Bhatia - The Pedagogical Account of Parliamentarism at India s Founding
© 2023 The Authors
Final published version, 178 KBLicence: CC BY

Cite this

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