A republican agenda

To be republican is to be part of an honourable fraternity and an old one. Not as old as the word itself, whose meaning altered over the centuries: of the first systems to which it was applied, the Greek polis or city-state remains historically unique while the Roman republic was, properly speaking, an oligarchy. It is to the Enlightenment that we owe the republican ideal in its modern sense: by the time of its full flowering, in 19th-century Europe, to be republican was to be on the side of representative democracy (with suitable property qualifications to be sure) against arbitrary despotism; worked-out and voted-upon constitutional arrangements rather than custom; and civic union as opposed to arbitrary boundaries defended by autocratic rulers. Above all, republicanism signified political radicalism, even though its actual programme might range from institutional reform to outright revolution.

Almost by definition, republicanism implies new laws and administrative arrangements – republics endure when their basis is firm. The legal and administrative reforms enacted during the French Revolution, and systematised by Napoleon Bonaparte, whose name they bore, were exported to Europe by example and conquest: the 'Code Napoleon' outlasted the Bourbon restoration and the Orleanist monarchy to serve as the founding text for the legal codes of any number of countries. However in India's case, the foundations were hollow from the very beginning. None of its founding fathers thought of themselves as republican, if their acts and legacies are anything to go by. B R Ambedkar is the sole exception, probably because his origins insulated him from that false pride in an ancient civilisation, which acted like a drug on the rest of his contemporaries. These, almost to a man or woman, were upper and middle caste, as well as class, in origin. This meant that they were, on the whole, comfortable with the Subcontinent's complex systems of hierarchy, even while (often sincerely) deploring them. It was this ingrained conservatism that shielded, for example, those decorative, entirely parasitic rulers of 'princely' states, so thoroughly emasculated by the British that they represented no military threat at all, by giving them a gilt-edged retirement plan rather than the outright expropriation they deserved.