Republics of Ancient India
This concluding part will examine the political characteristics of ancient republics to see how far it is actually justified to apply the terms ‘republic’/ ‘proto-republic’ to them and what their impact on modern India has been.
The word republic today signifies the use of democratic means to form a government, with this government, rather than a monarch, being the ruler of the populace – as power resides in the people.
While considering practices and peoples that existed thousands of years ago it should be clear that we are not talking of the universal adult suffrage of modern democratic republics, the present cannot and should not be superimposed on the past.
What is meant by ‘gana-sanghas’ as ‘republican’ or ‘proto-republican’ is the prevalence of some form of egalitarianism between most of the constituent members of the gana and rule by discussion and consensus.
A careful study of Vedic texts points to the existence of republican elements in Vedic polity. The kinds of gana-sanghas found in Vedic texts have been classified loosely into the following types (J P Sharma, Republics in Ancient India):
The first type is sanghas ruled by ‘kings’ who are appointed, even elected by the clan or tribe. There are references in the Rig Veda and Yajur Veda where the ‘vis’ or the people are said to ‘want’ or ‘desire’ a ‘king’, ta im viso na rajanam vrinana; the ‘king’ thus owed his position to the consent of the community.
The second category is where rule was through a sabha or aristocratic council made up of powerful members of the populace, and the third where the sabha ruled along with the samiti or the assembly of the people of the tribe. The membership of the sabha was only through personal excellence in war, speech, learning, wealth etc.
Another form of government was by a group of rajas or nobles who ruled along with the samiti.
These forms of government have also been found in practice in some of the kingdoms of the 1st millennium BCE as detailed in Buddhist, Jaina and Sanskrit sources. (Mentioned in Part 1 of this article).
Those tribe members who had military power, were land-owners, learned, good at debating etc. i.e. exceptional and stellar members of the community, were part of the ruling oligarchy. Others such as farmers, artisans, wage labourers or karmakars and brahmans , too lived as part of the gana but all of them did not enjoy equal political rights.
To put this in perspective, the much-vaunted Greek city-states where ‘democracy’ and ‘republicanism’ were ‘invented’ had participation in political affairs only from the male landholders. Women, slaves and the landless did not have a political voice; only the free adult, male landowners were ‘citizens’ of these ancient ‘democracies’.
There is an interesting contrast here as women took part in the original Rigvedic assembly of the people called the vidatha. A hymn in the Rig Veda also says that they are worthy of attending the sabha. Political participation of women seems to have been far greater in the ancient Indian proto-republics than the Greek ones.
To return to the Indian gana-sangha, the chief, also called ganapati or sanghamukhya, and the council or sabha met in the assembly hall called the santhagara. The office of the chief was not hereditary and he was elected for life. Meetings at the santhagara were probably announced by the beating of drums and there was a regulator of seats. Voting was done using pieces of wood called salakas and the collector of these votes was called the salaka-gahapati chosen for his honesty and impartiality. The gana puraka ensured the necessary quorum. Important matters were debated and decided by voting or by a consensus. There were advisers to the chief for administrative, treasury and military matters. Division of assemblies into political parties was well known as well as a division into smaller committees for specific purposes.
It has been mentioned that the battle between monarchy and republicanism was fought in the Indian sub-continent between Magadha and Vaishali. Much has been said about Magadha in earlier columns and it is worth looking at the Vajji Federation, made up of a number of gana-sanghas, which had its capital in Vaishali, in greater detail. This will be with specific reference to the Lichchavis, the most powerful and important constituents of this federation.
The Lichchavis formed a gana-sangha, where a considerable portion of the population was vested with the final power and ultimate authority of the state. They assembled at their capital, Vaishali, and had a council of nine nobles that was responsible to the assembly. All the members of the assembly were designated as rajas thus explaining the famous preamble to the Ekpanna-Jataka, which refers to 7707 rajas, uprajas, senapatis and bhandagarikas of Vaishali. The santhagara, where they met, was a political, religious and social centre, where decisions were taken using a political procedure similar to that described above.
It would have been at one of these meetings that the beauteous ganika Amrapali would have been anointed the nagarvadhu of Vaisahali. It was also at these meetings that the rajas were given a ritual bath in the ‘Pokkharani’ or the sacred bath and appointed to their positions after their selection/election/ratification by the assembly. The chief officer of the state, the head of the state, as it were, was also elected at one such ceremony, probably for life unless found guilty of a serious crime such as treason.
In a Jaina text, Raja Chedaga of Vaisali is mentioned as a king, who ruled with his councillors. He consulted the 18 confederate kings of Kasi-Kosala, the nine Lichchavis and the nine Mallakas when he took any decision as the head of the Vajji federation.
The best practices, as it were, of republics are worth quoting from the Mahaparinibbana Sutta in the form of what Gautam Buddha said were the foundations of the prosperity of the Vajji Federation. He set down the conditions for the Vajjis to prosper:
So long, Ananda, as the Vajjians meet together in concord, and rise in concord, and carry out their undertakings in concord… so long as they enact nothing not already established, abrogate nothing that has been already enacted, and act in accordance with the ancient institutions of the Vajjians as established in former days… so long as they honor and esteem and revere and support the Vajjian elders, and hold it a point of duty to hearken to their words… so long as no women or girls belonging to their clans are detained among them by force or abduction…
So long shall they prosper.
Concord, consensus and adherence to rules were thus the keys to the success of the republics and discord proved to be their undoing. In essence, this conforms to the principles of modern republicanism; the rule of law, individual rights and the sovereignty of the people.
It remains to discuss the continuum between republics of the past, monarchies which subsumed them in later centuries and the modern age.
The gana-sanghas we have been looking at allowed sharing of political power between people and oligarchic groups within them. The group of nobles chose a chief or sanghamukhya and this office metamorphosed with time into something closely resembling the monarch. The samiti changed its role and became a parishad, an advisory body of the king. Republics started to approximate monarchies. Due to their own internal contradictions or perhaps a trick of history the monarchical form of government vanquished them.
At the same time it was in the tradition and practice of the king, even when conceptualised as the chakravartin or universal monarch, ruling with the advice of his mantri parishad, that a reflection of the corporate nature of political power continued to be seen. The Arthashastra, amongst other treatises, has the theory of the mantri parishad in it and the practice can be seen, for instance, in Mauryan administration. Appointment as a mantri was carefully considered and important representatives of the people included in it.
Some scholars have pointed to the role of the people in establishing monarchies even up to the 8th century; with some evidence pointing to the election of Rudradaman (130 CE), Harshavardhana (606 CE) and Gopala (750 CE). The Cholas provide an exemplar of democratic practices into the next millennium, as do the Pallavas and the Pandyas to a lesser extent.
The other vestige that survived the tribulations and invasions of the country in the next millennium was that of village self-government where the elders of a village formed a panchayat to decide matters of importance; again the voice of the people in governing themselves.
To sum up, republicanism in a broad sense is the say the people have in governance. The idea of having a say in political matters has never been new to the population of the Indian sub-continent and it therefore took enthusiastically to the declaration of democracy and the republican form of government. That perhaps is the reason for the strength and resilience of the Republic of India even as many other republics and democracies have fallen by the wayside.
Recent Posts
The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.