The Perils and Discontents of ‘Swadeshi’ Jurisprudence

DURING THE SITTING of the ceremonial bench for the former Chief Justice of India (‘CJI’) B.R. Gavai, the Solicitor General of India, Tushar Mehta, said, addressing CJI Gavai, “After your taking over and with Justice Surya Kant, a fresh breeze of Indianness in our Jurisprudence has started flowing in.”  

In response to that, CJI Gavai stated that in the Presidential Reference case on the Powers of the Governor and President, the Constitution Bench had chosen to employ a ‘Swadeshi’ interpretation and did not rely on a single foreign judgment.  The same week on which the former Chief Justice spoke of a ‘Swadeshi’ Jurisprudence,  Prime Minister Narendra Modi, delivering the Sixth Ramnath Goenka Lecture, spoke of a national pledge “to free ourselves from the colonial mindset” in the next ten years. 

This could be merely a coincidence. But history teaches us that even coincidences have historical contexts. In this case, the necessary context lies in the many manifestations of decolonization. A silent battle is being waged for the meaning and soul of decolonization in India.

Decolonization and the Spectre of Obscurantism 

Meera Nanda, in her book ‘Postcolonial Theory and the Making of Hindu Nationalism’, makes a profound point: she calls the Postcolonial Left and the Hindu Right “two strange bedfellows” According to her, the attack by the Postcolonial Left on Western rationality and modernity has provided the conceptual vocabulary to the Hindu Right in its project of “decolonizing the Hindu mind.” We believe that postcolonial scholars have made immense contributions to unpacking epistemic injustice and persistent colonial biases in our institutions, knowledge systems, and regimes of truth. However, the failure of postcolonial scholarship lies in not giving sufficient pushback against the misappropriation of the language of decoloniality by the Hindu Right. 

In this misappropriation of decoloniality, the Hindu Right essentially claims that only Hindus have a claim over Indian nationhood, and minorities of India, especially Muslims and Christians, are the intruders and the ‘others.’ This misreading of decolonization is enabled by the political establishment. The valorization of ‘Swadeshi’ jurisprudence or interpretation requires our gaze of incredulity in the era when decolonization is misappropriated.

Sociologists Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller point out that “methodological nationalism” is a naturalization of the nation-state by the social sciences in which countries are treated like natural units. Nation states are equated with societies and national interests are conflated with the purpose of the social sciences. 

Building on the idea of methodological nationalism, Sabah Siddiqui argues that this methodology replaces the imperial universal with the national one without challenging the notion of the singularity of knowledge. Such provincialized singularity of knowledge attempts to decenter the Western canon of knowledge with the Indian equivalent, and results not in decolonization but recolonization. Siddiqui’s warning must be taken seriously, as in India, the replacement of Western knowledge, which is proposed by the Hindu Right, is Brahminical Knowledge. The government’s promotion of the ‘Indian Knowledge System’ is a form of Brahminical Knowledge being promoted in the name of decolonization.