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The essays in this volume propose a range of methodological perspectives from which these critical debates might be read. Adopting a multidisciplinary approach, they explore themes such as party politics, ideas of rights, including caste and minority rights, social justice and the philosophy of free speech.
The First Editon Of This Book Was Published 25 Years After Independence. This, Second, Edition Has Been Revised Keeping In View The Debates On The Constitution That Cropped Up In The Next 28 Years, Including The Current One, On The Revision Of The Entire Text, And Is Based On The Belief That The Constitution Of India Was Framed Within An Integrated Legal Political Structure Which May Be Affected By Piecemeal Amendments.
Whether the Congress party put forth a clichéd argument of accountability versus stability in defence of a parliamentary system, in haste, to enjoy the plums of office is the debate at the core of this book. The author takes the debate out of the realms of academia and into the homes of general readers. Students of history, political science and law have been fed on works of celebrated authors on the making of the Constitution of India. This is only half the story told. This book captures the disquiet among the members of the Constituent Assembly and outbursts by members of the dominant party that its leaders were 'settling' the Constitution behind closed doors. It examines threadbare the conclusion of many scholars that a great amount of deliberation and debate on merit took place in the Constituent Assembly before arriving at a form of government best suited to India. Proposed meaningful and far-reaching amendments made by some members, whom Ambedkar fondly called the 'rebels', were rejected outright, under one pretext or another, to silence dissent. The post-Independence political history of India bears testimony that the apprehensions voiced by these so-called 'rebels' played out to be true. In the Constituent Assembly, however, their voices, pregnant with a warning, were voices in the wilderness.
"How did the founders of the most populous democratic nation in the world meet the problem of establishing a democracy after the departure of foreign rule? The justification for British imperial rule had stressed the impossibility of Indian self-government. At the heart of India's founding moment, in which constitution-making and democratization occurred simultaneously, lay the question of how to implement democracy in an environment regarded as unqualified for its existence. India's founders met this challenge in direct terms-the people, they acknowledged, had to be educated to create democratic citizens. But the path to education lay not in being ruled by a superior class of men but rather in the very creation of a self-sustaining politics. Universal suffrage was instituted amidst poverty, illiteracy, social heterogeneity, and centuries of tradition. Under the guidance of B. R. Ambedkar, Indian lawmakers crafted a constitutional system that could respond to the problem of democratization under the most inhospitable of conditions. On January 26, 1950, the Indian constitution-the longest in the world-came into effect. More than half of the world's constitutions have been written in the past three decades. Unlike the constitutional revolutions of the late-eighteenth century, these contemporary revolutions have occurred in countries that are characterized by low levels of economic growth and education; are divided by race, religion, and ethnicity; and have democratized at once, rather than gradually. The Indian founding is a natural reference point for such constitutional moments-when democracy, constitutionalism, and modernity occur simultaneously"--