Law & the State
Free India kept the administrative machine built between 1760 and 1830. What decolonising the codes on substance — not just their names — would actually take.
Dharampal's recurring diagnosis is not that the British wrote harsh laws but that they built a whole apparatus — revenue, police, courts, the "obey first, protest later" relation between subject and state — between roughly 1760 and 1830, and then, after 1857, made it ever more secure. His claim, stated in Bharat ka Swadharm, is that after the transfer of power in 1947 "our entire governmental apparatus… is still very largely founded upon that same structure."
Two casualties are specific. The self-governing village, funded from its own produce-shares, was dismantled as a unit of the polity. And the older dharmic contract — in which peaceful non-cooperation was a legitimate, expected channel against an unjust levy — was replaced by a centralised code in which the state commands and the subject petitions.
THE OLDER ICON OF NON-VIOLENT REFUSAL · WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
In Civil Disobedience and Indian Tradition (1971), Dharampal reconstructs a mass, non-violent house-tax hartal from the East India Company's own judicial and revenue records — more than a century before Gandhi. The trigger was Regulation XV of 1810 (enacted 6 October 1810), which levied 5% on house rents and 10% on shops. The yield was trivial — about Rs. 3 lakh a year against a Bengal revenue of Rs. 10.68 crore — but the tax on the home itself became a rallying point. At Benares, then roughly 50,000 houses, the city shut down from 26 December 1810 to 8 January 1811; thousands sat in dharna, a "dharma-letter" summoned one person from every family, and the collector recorded that the protesters "vaunt their security in being unarmed." The tax was repealed. Documented Independently confirmed by Richard Heitler in the IESHR (1972).
Two readings are contested, and this archive keeps both. Dharampal's larger claim — that satyagraha was an indigenous Indian tradition rather than a lesson from Thoreau or Tolstoy — is a defensible interpretation, not a settled fact; scholars such as Irschick and Freitag read these actions within Banaras's own civic-ritual repertoire. Contested And the crowd size: Dharampal cites a contemporary estimate of 200,000+, while Erskine's records put it at 20,000–30,000 — an order-of-magnitude gap. Contested
On the polity itself, his first book, Panchayat Raj as the Basis of Indian Polity (1962, foreword by Jayaprakash Narayan), is a documentary autopsy of the Constituent Assembly: it prints, speaker by speaker, how the self-governing panchayat was argued over and then relegated to Article 40, in the non-enforceable Directive Principles. Documented
Dharampal's direction is decentralisation on substance. In Bharat ka Swadharm he calls for "local autonomy" over education, health, water, agriculture, craft, security and cultural life — each village, village-group, ward and mohalla managing its own affairs "at different levels," with the Centre kept to what genuinely cannot be done below. The test is whether power and resources actually move, not whether an old name is restored.
He frames this as an open problem, not a programme: the form and "model" of society and politics "will be by the wider Indian intellect," and cannot be run "by any one central cadre or group." The design brief is decolonisation of the code's logic — the relation between people and state — rather than a renaming exercise.
- The Indian Penal Code (1860), the Code of Criminal Procedure and the Evidence Act (1872) were replaced by the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita and Sakshya Adhiniyam, in force from 1 July 2024. Documented — the counter-view, argued by legal scholars at NLSIU, is that the new codes may repackage rather than truly decolonise, which is exactly Dharampal's distinction between changing a structure and repainting it.
- Panchayats gained constitutional teeth only with the 73rd Amendment (1992). The claim that Dharampal's books drove that amendment is Unsupported — no documented citation link exists; the lineage runs through the Balvantray Mehta Committee and the broader Gandhian-decentralisation current.
- Rajiv Dixit's widely repeated figure that "34,735 colonial laws still governed free India" is Contested — the structural continuity is real, but the exact count is folkloric.
Sources
- Dharampal, Civil Disobedience and Indian Tradition (1971) — full text PDF · dharampal.net summary. Company judicial & revenue records (India Office Library). Corroboration: R. Heitler, "The Varanasi House Tax Hartal of 1810–11," IESHR 9:3 (1972).
- Dharampal, Panchayat Raj as the Basis of Indian Polity (1962) — CPS PDF (Constituent Assembly proceedings; Article 40).
- Present-day: BNS / BNSS / BSA (in force 1 July 2024); NLSIU critique. See Evidence & Claims.