Accountability and Corruption: Parliamentary Debates in the Postpartition History of India

Historians of South Asia have studied the impact of the Second World War (19439-1945) and Partition (1946-1954) on the Indian subcontinent, few works have approached events in the late 1940s in terms of the contradictory crises that newly-founded Indian state encountered in the wake of independence. While on one hand, the Second World War created an enormous colonial war bureaucracy, the independence and the Partition adversely impacted the Indian state capacities and resources. This presentation will examine how the discourse of accountability in the 1940s was also inextricably tied with what I call as the “crisis democracy,” namely the idea that accountability in Indian democracy was a result of its formative responses to these seemingly contradictory crises such as the colonial war bureaucracy, independence, and the Partition.