Voting, Religion, and the People’s Sovereignty in Late Colonial India

Abstract

The chapter discusses the connections between religion and popular sovereignty during the late colonial period in relation to voting. The author explores two key aspects of the legal contradictions embedded in elections, the legal concept of ‘undue influence’ and the relationship between conscience, community, and free choice. The paradoxes of sovereignty were increasingly transposed into the self, conceived as an inner struggle between conscience and free choice, on one side, and the coercive pressures of society, on the other. The chapter also discusses several election cases in India and Burma starting in the 1920s, in which issues of ‘undue influence’ were raised, and explicates the difficulties of distinguishing religion as a form of external power exerted by religious authorities, from free devotional commitment to a religious community. Emphasizing the Protestant missionary background of the ideas of a moral self, conscience, and free choice, the author asserts that such ideas resonated with many Indian Protestant missionary.