SYNOPSIS:
Democracy, both as a value and a
system, has remained an amorphous concept for both its seekers and scholars.
Though having its accepted origin in ancient Greece (508 BC), it certainly has
ingredients rooted in the history of many continents, regions and civilizations
even before Greeks patented the nomenclature.
There are signs of self-governance
models in the ancient Near East from around the 6th century BC,
particularly among the Medes; the ‘Collegia’ of the Roman period having
associations of various social, economic, religious, funerary and even sportive
nature officers elected every year, often directly modeled on the Senate of
Rome; The German tribal system described by Tacitus in Germania and so on.¹
In fact, the list gets longer if we
enter in to the medieval ages. However, the spread of democratic ideals and
practices to other cultures and even failure thereof have been explained by the
Historians on the assumption that Democracy or personal liberty are ideals
foreign to the non-Western cultures – an assumption at least as old as
Herodotus.²
There are no perfect models of democracy
waiting to be discovered, but there seems to be scattered evidences of “government by discussion”, in which
groups of people having common interests make decisions that affect their lives
through debate, consultation and voting. Majority of these groups or
governments have been either called ‘Oligarchies’ or ‘Tribal Clans’, little
realizing that even the best form of democracy in the present times had to
undergo a process of evolution, well perceived by Emile Durkheim (a French
Sociologist & philosopher) when he describes “Democracy is not a discovery
or rediscovery of our century, it is the character increasingly assumed by
societies……its rise has been continuous from the beginning of history”. ³
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¹ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_democracy
² See for
example Herodotus, The Histories 7. 135, Trans. Aubrey de Selincourt, rev. ed.
– Harmondsworth, 1972 p. 485: the famous reply of the Spartan emissaries to the
Persian General Hydarnes
³ Emile
Durkheim in ‘Lecons the Sociologie’ quoted by Raymond Aaron in ‘Main Currents
of Sociological Thoughts 2’ translated by Richard Howard and Helen Weaver –
Penguin Books 1967
Durkheim’s proposed definition of
democracy implies that the political order, that is, the order of command and
authority, is only a secondary phenomenon in society as a whole, and that
democracy itself must be characterized by certain features of the society such
as degree of consciousness of the governmental functions, degree of
communication between the mass of the population and the government. He takes a
dim view of direct universal suffrage.¹
Durkheim’s evolutionist view gets
further support by the contemporary explorations of philosophers, most notably John
Rawls, who saw ‘the exercise of public
reason’ as the central feature of democracy.² Similarly, standard works and
authorities of Political Science define ‘Republic’ as a state where the
sovereign power vests, not in a single person or monarchy, but in a group or
college of persons, more or less numerous. Oligarchies, aristocracies and
democracies have all been labeled as republics. Thus Sparta, Athens, Rome,
Medieval Venice, the United Netherlands and Poland have all been described as
republics, though none possessed universal suffrage as the basis of their
respective systems of governance.
Universal suffrage was not available to
women in France in the 20th Century. In the republic of ancient
Greece and Rome, the franchise was confined to a small minority; in the
medieval republic of Venice, the franchise was the right given to a strictly
limited aristocracy which itself was dominated by a small oligarchy; the
republic of 7 states of Netherlands was undoubtedly governed by an elected
stateholder, but he was selected by the votes of burghers who only had the
franchise rights. Even in modern times in USA, millions of Negroes were
deprived of franchise rights for a long time, and England had similar pocket
boroughs till the middle of the 19th century.
Moreover, Franchise can be only one of
the ways to effect democracy, but its reach and effectiveness ‘depend
critically on the opportunity for open public discussion’, whereas public
reasoning includes the opportunity for citizens to participate in political
discussion and to influence public choice.
James Buchanan, the founder of the contemporary discipline of ‘public choice theory’ too has argued
that the definition of democracy as “government
by discussion” implies emphasis on individual values which do affect the
forms and nature of governance.
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¹ Raymond Aron in ‘Main Currents in Sociological Thought
2’ translated by Richard Howard and Helen Weaver – Penguin Books, 1967, p. 93
² See his ‘Justice as Fairness: A Restatement’, ed. Erin
Kelly (Cambridge, Mass): Harvard University Press, 2001, p. 50
If we take the aforesaid contemporary
and more rational view of democracy, we will appreciate the claims of those
ancient republics of India who stood test of time in establishing and beholding
examples of ‘governments by discussion’
for centuries together. There seems to be a major departure from monarchical
form of government from the later vedic period as indicated in the Rig Vedic
Brahmana, the Aitareya, and in the Yajur Veda and its Brahmana, the Taittiriya.
Megasthenes, the famous Greek writer, records the changes in tradition:
‘Sovereignty (Kingship) was dissolved and democratic governments set up’ in
various places.¹
As late as in 1903, T.W. Rhys Davids, the leading Pali scholar, pointed out in his book
‘Buddhist India’ (London, 1903) that
the Buddhist Pali Canon (and the Jatakas,
a series of Buddhist legends set in the same period but composed much later)
depicted a country in which there were many clans, dominating extensive and
populous territories, who made their public decisions in assemblies, moots, or
parliaments.²
Since then classical sources like Vedas, their Brahmanas, Buddhist Pali canons,
Buddhist works in Sanskrit, Panini’s grammar in Sanskrit ‘The Ashtadhyayi’, the ‘Mahabharata’,
the Jaina canons, works of Greek writers who accompanied Alexander the Great during his Indian
expedition and even Kautilya’s ‘Arthasastra’
have been meticulously ploughed through for evidence and insights. Coins and
inscriptions have documented the existence of republics and the working of
popular assemblies.
My essay intends to examine one
important case of ‘government by discussion’ – the Republics of East and
North-west Ancient India of the period before 400 AD, mainly because they
deserve a rational place in world historiography and also to dispel the oft
held belief that the very concept of democracy is specifically “Western”.
The present essay has following goals:
a)
Summarize the
history of ancient Indian Republics taking the help of the various original
sources, research works and papers; and
b)
Examine the
historiographical evaluation of the Indian republican experience so as to place
them with deserved value as precursor to modern democracy.
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¹ Epitome of Megasthenes, Diod. II. 38; Mc
Crindle, Megasthenes pp. 38, 40.
²(www.nipissingu.ca/department/history/.../HISTDEM/indiadem.htm) Steve Muhlberger, Associate Professor of
History, Nipissing University in his article ‘Democracy in Ancient India”
