Book excerpt: The intense public engagement in making of the Constitution

The making of the Constitution animated Indians’ imaginative concerns far beyond what we have been accustomed to assume. The Indian public engaged with the Constitution by making suggestions both practical and theoretical. They spoke iteratively about means of securing democracy, about the unity of India, about a workable Constitution, a universal franchise and about their rights.

As their suggestions demonstrate, Indians were thinking beyond liberal rights: they spoke in terms of their entitlements, enforceability, enhancing capabilities and positive freedoms. Publics from all ranks of society immersed themselves in Constitution-making. India’s poor and dispossessed were significant actors in the process. The fact that peasants, labourers and the urban poor conceived of themselves through their caste identities underscores the reality of caste in shaping their economic and social life.

The poor were not, as has been commonly alleged, absent from the Constitution-making process, neither did they only ‘appear as apparitions’.

Public engagements with the making of the Constitution beyond the (Constituent) Assembly mirrored a ground reality of a multifarious, fractured yet vibrant organisational culture that could not be simply bound around common language, culture, religion, or ethnicity. Indians resisted, for example, sweeping classifications such as the ‘Great Hindu Community’. Instead, these groups perceived of themselves as ‘communities having a separate social organic structure with a different social, religious, and vocational standard only grouped together under a common federating name of Hindus’.

Paradoxically, the concurrent proposals and demands for representation made by so many different groups contributed to producing a sense of universality — a universe of minorities. More importantly, the way the public understood the Constitution and their desires from it at the time of Constitution-making helps clarify the evolution of India’s constitutional development into the present. When we turn our gaze away from the Constituent Assembly, we understand, for example, that the abolition of untouchability was far more transformative than has been acknowledged and not just limited to the exclusion of Dalits.

Many groups understood untouchability as a practice that affected society as a whole. Kotu Ram from the North-West Frontier identified untouchability at the heart of the Hindu-Muslim divide. The Nayi Brahmins in the United Provinces called out upper-caste Hindus for treating all other Indian communities as impure and saw this practice as limiting the future of democracy in India. The Hindu Women’s Association from Kumbakonam understood that the abolition of untouchability would also remove menstrual taboos against women. Whereas for orthodox upper-caste Hindus, the prospect of the abolition of untouchability was, as the Vaishnava Siddhanta Sabha claimed, comparable to the holocaust.

Most liberal constitutions, such as the American one, reconstituted the power of the dominant groups. In India, the abolition of untouchability was a battle that dominant, orthodox upper castes lost. This made the Constitution transformative. Constitutions are understood to encompass the constitutional text, constitutional practices and aspirations. Indians did not wait for a text to emerge before they started to simulate its effect on their lives. On the basis of their aspirations for the future Constitution, they in effect began to practice constitutionalism, write their own texts, and form their own interpretations.

In this process, diverse publics organised across India hundreds of assemblies, big and small, where they thoroughly engaged with the making of the Constitution. They wanted to literally take part and have a say. In doing so outside the Constituent Assembly, they gradually gained ownership of the Constitution-making process and paradoxically legitimated a body whose authority had been repeatedly called into question.

— De is associate professor of history at Yale, US. Shani is associate professor at the University of Haifa. Excerpted with permission from Penguin Random House