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3 - They, the People
- Sandipto Dasgupta, New School for Social Research, New York
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- Legalizing the Revolution
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Meet together if ye will, but do not meet in a mob.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley, An Address to the Irish PeopleOn the ruins of a hundred empires,
They go on working.
—Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Ora Kaj Kore’ (They Go On Working)These down-trodden classes are tired of being governed. They are impatient to govern themselves.
—B. R. Ambedkar, Constituent Assembly Debates, 25 November 1949The British Empire in India had begun with the conquest of Bengal, and Calcutta was its administrative and economic centre for a century and a half. The empire's largest metropolis, it was a space of unavoidable entanglements of the colonial rulers with Indian society. With the rise of anticolonial politics at the turn of the century, that proximity became a source of anxiety. In 1912, faced with growing political unrest and revolutionary terrorist activities in Calcutta, the British government of India decided to shift the capital to the city of Delhi, the former seat of power of the Mughals. Along with a symbolic continuity with the last Indian sovereign, Delhi offered empty land suitably distant from the settlements that remained from the Mughal era. In that space, separated from the increasingly raucous natives, a new imperial city could be built. The task of planning and building that city was given to the architects Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker. The buildings were monuments in the neoclassical style – the quintessential imperial architectural form, their ‘assertive magnificence’ and geometric clarity triumphantly announcing their superiority and separation from the society on which they were imposed. Around these buildings, tree-lined blocks were laid out following Beaux-Arts formalism. They were populated by spacious bungalows, the most archetypical of colonial houses designed specifically to provide the inhabiting officer with the necessary distance from the masses outside. The centrepiece of this design was the grand palace for the viceroy. A contemporary imperial writer wrote, approvingly, that the architecture was ‘a shout of the imperial suggestion … an offence to democracy, a slap in the face of the modern average man’. To the biographer of Lutyens, writing soon after India's independence, ‘New’ Delhi was ‘the last splendid assertion of European humanism, before the engulfing of its ideals in racial and ideological confusion’.
Part I - Revolution without a Revolution
- Sandipto Dasgupta, New School for Social Research, New York
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- Legalizing the Revolution
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- 30 June 2024, pp 43-44
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5 - Democracy and Parliamentarism
- Sandipto Dasgupta, New School for Social Research, New York
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- Legalizing the Revolution
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- 30 June 2024, pp 175-202
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Cannot light penetrate the masses? Light! Let us repeat it again and again – Light and more Light … dispense the alphabet, assert men's right. The crowd can be made sublime.
—Victor Hugo, Les MisérablesThere comes a grave question: given a mass of ignorance and poverty, is that mass less dangerous without the ballot? The answer to this depends upon whose danger one envisages.
—W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in AmericaWe are going to clothe them with political power – those who do not have two square meals a day and those who are almost beggars in the streets, and those who remain unemployed for nine months in a year.
—Jadubans Sahay, Constituent Assembly Debates,22 November 1949Not till the French Third Republic, in the year 1884, would universal male franchise be established in Europe, almost a century (or two in the case of England) after the advent of representative government. It would take until 1907 for the small settler colony of New Zealand to become the first country to have universal adult franchise. Only in the aftermath of the First World War would it become widely accepted in the Western world. It would take well into the 1960s for the various systemic barriers to voting in the United States to be removed and universal franchise to become a reality. The political struggle that developed over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries under the banner of democracy was for the expansion of franchise. It was won not by benevolence, but through blood and barricade, and eventually on the ruins of a continent-destroying war. In India, on the other hand, full and unrestricted universal adult franchise was instituted from the very first day the country became independent. In the previous chapter, we focused on the axis of continuity between the colonial and the postcolonial. What concerns us in this chapter is the most significant rupture brought about by the postcolonial transition: democracy. It remains a remarkable fact that the masses of India, a vast majority of whom were poor propertyless peasants, won the right of franchise.2 They would exercise that right only two years after the constitution was completed. The debates about franchise in the assembly were mostly retrospective, well after the issue was settled.
Contents
- Sandipto Dasgupta, New School for Social Research, New York
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Frontmatter
- Sandipto Dasgupta, New School for Social Research, New York
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Acknowledgements
- Sandipto Dasgupta, New School for Social Research, New York
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Part II - Authors
- Sandipto Dasgupta, New School for Social Research, New York
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Introduction: Decolonization and Constitution
- Sandipto Dasgupta, New School for Social Research, New York
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If the world is to be lived in, it must be founded.
—Mircea Eliade, The Profane and the SacredWhy is the originality so readily granted us in literature, so mistrustfully denied us in our difficult attempts at social change?
—Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nobel Lecture, 1982Standing on this sword's edge of the present between the mighty past and the mightier future, I tremble a little and feel overwhelmed by this task.
—Jawaharlal Nehru, Constitutional Assembly Debates,13 December 1946After the image comes the institution. Images of freedom, in their splendid multiplicity, had been articulated and organized since the beginning of the century. By mid-century, despite the best attempts of imperial regimes, they became impossible to ignore. So, the end of the Second World War began a two-decade-long process whereby nearly half of the world's population liberated itself from formal colonial domination. Now came the time to realize the free futures that had thus far only been imagined: to constitute the postcolony. Speaking at one of the early meetings of the Indian Constituent Assembly on the eve of the country's formal independence, Jawaharlal Nehru said, ‘Words are magic things often enough but even the magic of words sometimes cannot convey the magic of the human spirit and of a Nation's passion.’
The moment of postcolonial transition called for translating the suppressed aspirations of the long anticolonial decades into concrete, tangible, words – words that would construct the institutional architecture of the liberated postcolony: the constitution, which, Nehru said, ‘feebly seeks to tell the world of what we have thought or dreamt of for so long, and what we now hope to achieve in the near future’. The language of India's first prime minister, mixing the soaring with the halting, captured the dynamic of hopes and anxieties, dreams and disquiets that marked the postcolonial institutional moment.
We are a long way from those dreams, and even the disquiets are now set to a different register. While a much-discussed term again, decolonization today is thought of mainly as a discursive and epistemic project. The discursive has always been a crucial ground on which anticolonial resistance was mobilized.
Epilogue: The Biographies of the Indian Constitution
- Sandipto Dasgupta, New School for Social Research, New York
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Investigate the matter as you will,
blame whomever, as much as you want,
but the river hasn't changed,
the raft is still the same.
Now you suggest what's to be done,
you tell us how to come ashore.
—Faiz Ahmed Faiz, ‘You Tell Us What to Do’Political theorizing from the periphery demands a certain situatedness of analysis1 – that is, a reconstruction of the specific historical ‘background condition’ or ‘problem space’ of the articulations and formations being theorized. It also hopes to speak to the political lives of those in the periphery, to have some amount of critical purchase for postcolonial political existences. While I believe that many of the conjunctures that this book theorizes are shared across the postcolonial world, ultimately it is a book on India. At a time when both revolution and law seem exiled as political concepts, a book such as this cannot avoid speaking to the political present in the country. All true history, Benedetto Croce said, is contemporary history. The biography of the Indian constitution is no exception. The three main currents of scholarship on the constitution track the three stages in the life of postcolonial India. It would seem that we are now living through a fourth.
The Time of the Nation State
The first two decades following independence were times of hope in the promise of postcolonial development. At home the prominence of Nehru and the Congress remained unchallenged. The Planning Commission was set up to author India's future in five yearly chapters. The large hydroelectric dams and publicly owned iron foundries were ‘the temples of modern India’. Internationally, it was the time of Bandung and Suez. The Third World emerged as both a political idea and a global configuration. At home and abroad, a new world seemed possible.
It was the time of the nation and the state. The postcolonial intellectual scene was dominated by the so-called independence intellectuals, nourished by their hope in and support for the new government. The scholarship on Indian politics from this time reflects this sense of optimism. There was a general consensus across the social sciences (interrupted by occasional critics) on three broad elements: the Congress's ability to genuinely represent and reconcile the various segments of Indian society; faith in a state-led modernization project; and consolidation of a democratic form of government that was able to avoid major social conflicts.
1 - The Anticolonial Movement
- Sandipto Dasgupta, New School for Social Research, New York
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The writer who wishes to bring about a social revolution may nonetheless be a century ahead of his time; the tribune, however, which has in view a political revolution, cannot remove itself too far from the masses.
—Heinrich Heine, Französische ZuständeSeek ye first the political kingdom, and all things shall be added unto you.
—Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana: The Autobiographyof Kwame NkrumahWe shall not subvert the British Empire by allowing the Bengali Babu to discuss his own schools and drains.
—Evelyn Baring, quoted in Sumit Sarkar,Modern India: 1885–1947In 1885, Alan Octavian Hume, a retired civil servant and amateur ornithologist, gathered together seventy or so politically active Indian professionals in Bombay (present-day Mumbai) for a conference. They called themselves the Indian National Congress (hereafter, Congress). Hume was no charismatic founder of political movements. The last quarter of the nineteenth century saw the emergence of increasingly assertive political activities by educated professional classes in India, resulting in the formation of various regional political associations. Hume's was just the most successful effort in bringing them together on a single ‘national’ platform. At the time, neither the British nor the Indians saw the birth of the Congress as a major event. However, over the subsequent decades, the Congress would become the largest and the best organized party of the anticolonial cause. By the time of decolonization, most colonies would have their own version of the Congress. These were parties of the urban educated professional classes. In every colony, this class was a miniscule part of the population. So, the party of the professionals had to go in search of a social base. In the colonized world the largest social base was the peasant masses. By the end of the First World War, it became clear to any ambitious nationalist leader that mobilizing these masses was the only path to a successful anticolonial movement. Most anticolonial parties tried, some succeeded. None more so than the Congress which turned itself into a genuinely mass party under the leadership of M. K. Gandhi, eventually becoming the party of the postcolonial government.
Conclusion: Postcolonial Afterlives of Law and Revolution
- Sandipto Dasgupta, New School for Social Research, New York
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Independence is not a word which can be used as an exorcism, but an indispensable condition for the existence of men and women who are truly liberated, who are truly masters of all the material means which make possible the radical transformation of society.
—Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the EarthDemocracy is thirsty, cold, and hungry.
—Michel Chevalier, Des Intérêts Matériels en FranceHe was extraordinarily happy today because he was going to witness with his own eyes the coming of the new constitution. In the morning fog, he went around the broad and narrow streets of the city but everything had the same old and worn-out look. He wanted to see colour and light. There was nothing.
—Sadaat Hasan Manto, ‘The New Constitution’Foreboding and Hope
The long process of drafting the Indian constitution was coming to an end. It was the time for concluding speeches in the Constituent Assembly: members sharing their final thoughts on what they had (or had not) been able to accomplish. Ambedkar had done more than most to shape the text that was now in front of them. His speech would become one of most quoted parts of the assembly debates. ‘If we wish to maintain democracy not merely in form, but also in fact, what must we do?’ Ambedkar asked. This was his answer:
The … thing we must do is not to be content with mere political democracy. We must make our political democracy a social democracy as well. Political democracy cannot last unless there lies at the base of it social democracy.… On the 26th of January 1950 we are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality. In politics we will be recognizing the principle of one man one vote and one vote one value. In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man one value. How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions? How long shall we continue to deny equality in our social and economic life? If we continue to deny it for long, we will do so only by putting our political democracy in peril.
Notes
- Sandipto Dasgupta, New School for Social Research, New York
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7 - Property and Labour
- Sandipto Dasgupta, New School for Social Research, New York
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Landlord of England art thou now, not king,
Thy state of law is bondslave to the law.
—William Shakespeare, Richard IILand is like ivies. It requires the might of the stick to maintain and grow. Everything else comes after. Comes on their own. Even the law.
—Satinath Bhaduri, Dhorai Charit ManasThe way this question is being dealt with may appear to them not completely right so far as they are concerned – but it is a better way and a juster way, from their point of view, than any other way that is going to come later. That way may not be by any process of legislation. The land question may be settled differently.
—Jawaharlal Nehru, Constitutional Assembly Debates, 10 September 1949In 1935, in the midst of the global depression, W. E. B. Du Bois published Black Reconstruction in America. The purpose of the book was to challenge the dominant narrative on the failures of the post-Civil War reconstruction in the American South. But the book was concerned with a failure on a larger scale – of democracy in America. At an even larger scale, the arguments of the book foreshadowed the challenges for the not-yet-born democracies in the still colonized peripheries. For Du Bois, the end of the Civil War and the initial years of the Reconstruction offered a singular chance for the realization of democracy in America. The first step towards this was franchise for the formerly enslaved (male) black workers. The next step, Du Bois argued, had to be a proper redistribution of land to those workers. After all, he noted, ‘their demand for a reasonable part of the land on which they had worked for a quarter of a millennium was absolutely justified’. Ownership of some property that ensured their subsistence was the only thing that could prevent the formerly enslaved from being forced back into a relationship of dependence on and subservience to the very plantations they had been emancipated from. It was not only just, but also necessary. Universal franchise could not survive, Du Bois wrote, ‘without personal freedom, land, and education’. Thus arose the demand for 40 acres of land for emancipated black workers.
Index
- Sandipto Dasgupta, New School for Social Research, New York
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8 - Judiciary and Lawyers
- Sandipto Dasgupta, New School for Social Research, New York
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With words a dispute can be won,
With words a system can be spun.
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, FaustToday the gates have receded to remoter and loftier places; no one points the way; many carry swords, but only to brandish them, and the eye that tries to follow them is confused. So, perhaps, it is really best to do as Bucephalus has done, and absorb oneself in law books.
—Franz Kafka, The New AdvocateWhy not wait for this court or that court to decide? I want to tell them that a few million people have waited for too long a period. There is not going to be much more waiting by these millions outside.
—Jawaharlal Nehru, Debate on the Constitution(First Amendment) BillRaj Darbhanga, in the province of Bihar, was one of the largest landed estates in colonial India. The size of the estate was 2,400 square miles, and it spanned over six districts. The landlord of this estate was Kameshwar Singh, KCIE, the abbreviation at the end standing for ‘Knight Commander of the Indian Empire’. It was an honour that Singh had earned, like his ancestors, by being a reliable ally of the colonial government. When the British departed, Singh became, like several of his peers, a member of the Constituent Assembly. There his most notable contribution was an impassioned speech against any kind of land reform on the grounds that it would be discriminatory towards landlords like him. ‘Does it behove such an august Assembly as this,’ he asked, ‘to discard principles and disfigure the edifice which is sought to be built on the four pillars of Justice, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, by introducing iniquitous discrimination?’ Singh's argument did not carry the day in the assembly. The Bihar Land Reforms Act was passed within months of the constitution coming into effect. It then required, as the constitution stipulated, the assent of the president. The president, Rajendra Prasad, was himself from Bihar and friendly to the powerful landlords. He initially refused to give his assent and retracted only when Nehru threatened to resign. That was, however, not the end of the story.
2 - Transformations
- Sandipto Dasgupta, New School for Social Research, New York
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Men shall henceforth do consciously, and with better directed and more useful effort, what they have hitherto done unconsciously, slowly, indecisively, and too ineffectively.
—Henri de Saint-Simon, quoted in Felix Markham (ed.), Social Organization, The Science of Man, and Other WritingsSooner or later they will leave our country, just as many people throughout history left many countries. Once again we shall be as we were – ordinary people – and if we are lies we shall be lies of our own making.
—Tayeb Salih, The Season of Migration to the NorthWe ourselves during our freedom movement said that it was not for the loaves and fishes of office that we were fighting but rather that we might have the political power in our hands with which we could fashion and remould and change the whole structure of society in such a manner that the grinding poverty of the masses may be removed, the living conditions of the people may improve and we could establish a society of equals in this great country of ours.
—Purnima Banerji, Constituent Assembly Debates, 24 November 1949The end of the British Empire in India came about at the appointed hour: precisely at midnight when the calendar turned from 14 to 15 August in 1947. ‘At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom,’ Nehru declared. The certainty of the appointed moment was reflected in his use of the simple future affirmative. If there is one thing a revolution never offers, it is temporal certainties. Revolutionary moments are defined by the ‘unpredictability of emergences’. Revolutionary time is experienced, by both participants and observers, as rapid and chaotic. Nehru's confidence conveyed that this was not the case here. The Indian people were not awakened by the tumult of a revolutionary upheaval, but the disciplined alarm clock of a transfer of power. The certainty, however, was only about the appointed hour of a formal transfer of power. ‘[The] future is not one of ease or resting but of incessant striving,’ Nehru continued, ‘[s]o that we may fulfil the pledges we have so often taken and the one we shall take today.’
Dedication
- Sandipto Dasgupta, New School for Social Research, New York
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4 - The Constituent Administrator
- Sandipto Dasgupta, New School for Social Research, New York
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Calculators, it is now up to you: count, measure, compare.
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social ContractThe class war will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie.
—John Maynard Keynes, ‘Am I a Liberal?’There are two things that the British have left behind for us. One is the efficiency of the civil services and the other is the rule of law.
—P. Subbarayan, Constituent Assembly Debates,25 November 1949In 1949, S. Sampurnanand, a minister in the government of the United Provinces, was addressing a convocation of students in the city of Agra. His subject was the nearly completed constitution, which was being drafted only a few hundred kilometres to the west in Delhi. That constitution, he remarked, should have had ‘something of a sacred character which inspires future generations. It is in the case of important States the embodiment of a living faith, the philosophy of life of those who framed it.’ However, ‘judged by this criterion’, the soon-to-be constitution ‘is a miserable failure.… It is just a piece of legislation like, say, the Motor Vehicles Act.’ The Indian constitution did not actually say much about motor vehicles or how to regulate them. For Sampurnanand, what it did share with that most routine of administrative statutes was its style. The constitution ran into several pages and contained an extraordinary amount of detail. It had 395 articles, each with numerous sub articles and halting caveats, not to mention eight lengthy ‘Schedules’, totalling to 146,000 or so words, making it the lengthiest national constitution by a fair margin. Constitutions, as per the Congress socialist Sampurnanand, were meant to be animated by the ‘living faith’ of revolutionary founders, not weighed down by detailed manuals on how to operate the complex machineries of the state. They should be crafted by inspirational assertions of exemplary lawgivers instead of being burdened with the meticulous calculations of administrators. Sampurnanand's criticism was dismissed by the members of the assembly. And it has not fared any better in the seven decades since. Of all the many, many words written to discuss and analyse the Indian constitution, few, if any, acknowledge Sampurnanand, or his line of criticism.
Part III - Institutions
- Sandipto Dasgupta, New School for Social Research, New York
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6 - Rights and Repression
- Sandipto Dasgupta, New School for Social Research, New York
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One cannot write poems about trees when the forest is full of police.
—Bertolt Brecht, The Life of GalileoLooking back, my dreams were full of prisons.
—Dionne Brand, Ossuary IThe right of the people to rebel against a government also [implies] the duty of the government to hang the people for the rebellion. These go together.
—Pattabhi Sitaramayya, Constituent Assembly Debates,25 November 1949Since the beginning of the Cold War, constitutions came to be known primarily as charters consisting of certain fundamental and inviolable norms: norms whose inviolability best captured the spirit of the ‘free world’. Constitutions were meant to limit the exercise of state power through some norms whose validity was universal. Central to that conception was an enumerated set of rights whose template was the Bill of Rights in the American constitution. ‘Any critique of rights,’ Duncan Kennedy wrote, ‘smacked of Stalinism.’ The centrepiece of the post-war Japanese and West German constitutions (both drafted under United States occupation) was an extensive list of rights. Even the new international order had its own ‘bill of rights’. If the Bill of Rights was a clear line of contrast between the free West and the unfree Soviets, there was a third part of the world whose position was more ambiguous.
Most of the postcolonial states adopted some version of a bill of rights. But what exactly rights meant in a postcolonial context – liberation? conservatism? mimicry? insignificance? – remained a matter of debate. The fall of the Soviet Union, however, ended that debate and any political challenge to the empire of rights. The ‘hallmark of [the] process of “democratization”’ of post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe ‘was the formal adoption of bills of rights as the essential marker of constitutional change in the emergence of each new democratic regime’. In the postcolonial world, it was time to abandon any lingering ambiguity, to recast (if not entirely remake) constitutional texts and practices in terms of this new ‘rights revolution’. Since then India's own version of the Bill of Rights known as the ‘fundamental rights’ has commandeered the overwhelming share of scholarly attention on the Indian constitution, as well as in textbooks, law school curricula, and public commentary.