The Indian Constitution is considered a document which expresses the core values of anticolonial movement led by the Indian National Congress though other diverse nationalisms also participated and contributed in it. The book under review makes an overarching attempt to present an innovative interpretation of India’s Constitution making, and investigates the possibilities, challenges and incongruities of the mission. The book is divided into three thematic parts: the first focuses on the political, social and the ideational context for the Constitution making process; the second probes the roles and relevance of competing authors of the postcolonial order; and the third analyses the institutional set up created by the Constitution, their key features and contradictions. Interestingly, the author underlines that ‘to speak in terms of architectural metaphor that appears often in the book, Part I concerns the ground, Part II the architects and builders and Part III the structure itself’ (p. 28). Through the conclusion and the Epilogue, the author has considered some crucial aspects of the Constitution making and underlined the contemporaneousness of some of the themes of the book.
Sandipto Dasgupta uses transformational constitutionalism to understand the making of the Indian Constitution and the impact of its many crucial provisions. He underlines that ‘transformational constitutionalism was a constitutional order whose orienting principle was planned social transformation…It sought to facilitate change, not constrain it’ (p. 10). Through systematic and thematic study of various aspects of the Indian Constitution, the author tries to explore how far these provisions created a solid ground for transformational constitutionalism. He emphasizes that the anticolonial movement in India had three distinct assertions, i.e., constitutional liberal, mass mobilization and administrative. All these currents were against colonial rulers, but there was a deep tension between the elite and the masses of the Indian society. For the new postcolonial order the Congress gave priority to administrative over the popular form based on mass mobilization.
The book asserts that anticolonial struggle also focused on the socio-economic aspects of national life, which give prominence to the idea of centralization. Gandhi’s alternative developmentalism had a fatal weakness because he hoped to create a decentralized polity on the basis of an anticolonial movement which had a strong centralizing feature. The author also presents a critique of other aspects of postcolonial economic changes: for example, he argues that rather than equality the primary goal of planning was industrialization and making the nation economically independent rather than equality.
The author asserts that there were two competing authors of the Constitution: first, the ‘people’, and the second the administrators, but the ‘people’ were absent from the Constitution making. However, he simultaneously underlines that absence does not imply silence and inaction. Hence, the absence of masses was ‘active’, because many militant mass movements and mobilizations outside the Constituent Assembly compelled the Constitution makers to make many provisions for the masses. The author makes a very interesting argument regarding the impact of identities created by the colonial state on postcolonial India. The colonial regimes categorized the Indian population on the basis of the ascribed and unalterable identities of caste and religion. Though the anticolonial movements created a distinct conception of people as self-fashioning collectively, the postcolonial state abandoned the project of collective self-determination and implicitly accepted the colonial forms of classification. The author considers it as a negative development for postcolonial India, primarily in the context of the minority question. The book also emphasizes that the constituent subject of the postcolony was the administrator. The colonial state assembled a formidable apparatus to comprehend, manage, and order the colonial society, which the Congress was willing and able to inherit with little alteration. The continuity of the administrative apparatus was at the cost of non-revolutionary transition, which prohibited a truly transformative break.
The book presents a systematic analysis of the institutional architecture created by the Constituent Assembly, and discusses four key themes: parliamentary democracy, rights, property and judiciary. The study of these themes includes their colonial genealogy, the ideas of the anticolonial movement regarding them, constitutional provisions, and contestation generated by postcolonial manifestations. The author praises the provision of universal suffrage in the Indian Constitution and describes it as an institutional rejection of the regime of hierarchy of the colonial empire. Similarly, the Indian Constitution makers did not copy the parliamentary system from colonial rule, but adopted it as a dialogical forum, which would provide the space and opportunities to understand the views from the ground on several issues including development. He however asserts that Parliament turned into a collaborator of experts, which resulted in undermining the democratic possibilities of postcolonial parliamentarianism. Gradually, it changed citizens as part of the population, which could be aggregated through elections.
The book also makes a claim that rather than a charter of rights, ideas of self-determination and democracy were the key guiding forces against the colonial regime. It proposes that rights should not be described in terms of limits or guarantees, but should be considered as an instrument of incorporations of the fractious masses into acquired and established constitutional institutions. Most importantly, it underlines that the perseverance of many colonial repressive laws shows an inherent contradiction of the claim that rights should be considered as basic tenets of postcolonial freedom. The issue of property rights was a contested topic for the Constituent Assembly. Though the anticolonial movement opposed the inequalities caused by the zamindari system, the Constituent Assembly accepted it as a fundamental right of the citizen. The author asserts that it was a recognition of the peripheries’ continuing subjugation to the empire of property. He makes a crucial claim regarding the relationship between transformational constitutionalism and lawyers. The overarching argument is that lawyers posed a threat to the transformational constitutional project, as immediately following the Constitution, the judiciary struck down several pieces of land reform legislation. In other cases too, the judiciary has not played a very conducive role to challenge the existing power structure within the society. The conclusion looks at the first decade of independent India and the evident failure of the social transformational project to achieve its objective.
Though the book presents a comprehensive study of the Indian Constitution, some of the conclusions overlook the positive and transformational impact of certain institutions created by the Constitution. First, though the author underlines the importance of the adoption of universal suffrage by the Indian Constitution, he entirely misses its possible impact on the parliamentary system. The Parliament not only gave representation to the marginalized sections of the society, but also passed many crucial legislations to empower them. Second, the author’s analysis of the Fundamental Rights or Judiciary also lacks focus on their positive contribution in protecting the democratic essence of postcolonial India. Third, it seems that the author is not prepared to see the positive roles played by certain categories which emerged from colonial classification. Such categories have played a crucial role in empowering the marginalized sections like the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. Indeed, the book does not focus on Constitution making and its limitations from the perspective of marginalized groups, particularly Dalits and Adivasis.
However, this is a deeply researched and insightful investigation of the founding moment of Indian democracy which provides a detailed examination of the limitations of the various aspects of the Indian Constitution.
Kamal Nayan Choubey teaches Political Science at Dyal Singh College, University of Delhi, Delhi.