Why the making of Constitution matters today

THE deliberations in the two-day debate on 75 years of the Constitution in Parliament saw the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) highlighting their own commitment to the constitutional vision, but equally keen on pointing to lapses committed by the rival side.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi singled out the Congress for a no-holds-barred attack. He blamed the Nehru-Gandhi family for the subversion of the Constitution. He cited, for example, the Congress party's hand in suppressing the constitutional rights through the imposition of the Emergency and the role of Jawaharlal Nehru in the first amendment to the Constitution.

Rahul Gandhi framed his intervention in terms of a conflict between the competing ideologies of civic nationalism and Hindutva, distinguishing the upholders of the Constitution from the supporters of Manusmriti — a text whose tenets challenge the basic premises of India's foundational doctrine.

The BJP relentlessly criticised the Congress as the principal offender when it comes to transgressions of the Constitution. However, the BJP overlooked that in some instances, it has surpassed the Congress in these transgressions.

The debate was noteworthy in another respect, with doubts being raised about the Congress' preeminent role in Constitution-making.

Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, while initiating the debate in the Lok Sabha, said attempts had been made to project the Constitution as a contribution of a particular party in the last few years. "Today, I want to make it clear that our Constitution is not the gift of a single party."

It might be interesting to ask why this unhistorical reconstruction is being made. It's certainly not the "gift of one party". But, having been largely absent from the freedom struggle and the Constituent Assembly, we can, perhaps, sympathise with the impulse of the BJP to downsize the Congress' role and insert its own ideas in the proceedings from which it was basically absent.

But this is not just about downplaying the Congress' role in drafting the Constitution. It demonstrates more stark attempts to further mainstream the BJP's discursive and political agenda of rewriting the national script to reinterpret events in consonance with the needs of contemporary Hindu nationalist politics. The BJP is unmistakably leveraging its power at the Centre for a calculated reconstruction of modern history.

There is no shortage of historical analyses of the origins of the Constitution and, yet, repeated attempts are being made to misrepresent and misinterpret its history.

One has to see the Constitution as the product of a collective deliberation that stretched over three years —more than 7,500 amendments were tabled and 2,500 moved and a document of almost 400 articles emerged, one of the longest of its kind.

Its drafters were chosen by indirect elections. But it was Indians who drafted it. No colonial theory and practice was involved in shaping the Constitution. Our own versions of democracy, secularism and federalism driven by principles of equality, justice and fraternity underlined it.

This vision of a new India of "equal citizens" was articulated in the Karachi Congress Resolution of 1931. It went on to become the core of the Congress campaign in the 1937 elections and later, formed the core of the Constitution.

Contrary to the Defence Minister’s claim that the Congress was not the only party which drafted the Constitution, the fact is that the vast majority of the Constituent Assembly's members were elected on a Congress ticket, leading to charges that the Assembly was entirely dominated by the Congress. Granville Austin, in his monumental study of The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation, notes that the "Constituent Assembly was a one-party body in an essentially one-party country…."

Thanks to Mahatma Gandhi, BR Ambedkar was appointed Chairman of the Drafting Committee and he, undoubtedly, played an important role in drafting the Constitution.

But the Drafting Committee was not entirely a free agency. The draft of the Constitution was discussed as per the views and recommendations of various subject committees and the draft itself was discussed, amended and, ultimately, adopted by the larger Constituent Assembly.

This is a critical aspect to bear in mind, especially as in many of the debates, Ambedkar was not expressing his own opinions but "lawyering" on behalf of the draft amendments discussed in the subject committees. This explains his remark that he was a "hack", as noted by Anand Teltumbde in his recently published biography, Iconoclast: A Reflective Biography Of Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar.

Nehru played the most significant role in the deliberations of the Constitution. The process of constitution-making began with the Aims and Objectives resolution moved by Nehru on December 13, 1946, which became the Preamble. The landmark Objectives Resolution defined India as an independent sovereign republic in which all power would be "derived from the people", guaranteeing to "all the people of India justice, social, economic and political; equality of status, of opportunity, and before the law; freedom of thought, expression, belief, faith, worship, vocation, association and action, subject to law and public morality."

The objectives enshrined in the Preamble contain the Basic Structure doctrine, which has given our wonderful Constitution a certain permanence and stability. This owes mostly to the vision articulated in the Constituent Assembly debates, but this was in no way inevitable or preordained. Constitutionalism based on adult franchise and fundamental rights marked a sharp break with history, faith and identity, signposting instead a strong linkage between the anti-colonial mass nationalism and the equal rights personified in the Constitution. The decisive factor was the sheer sweep of the anti-caste social reform and anti-colonial mass movements in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

India's adoption of a Constitution enshrining political equality of all citizens was a major human and political achievement of the modern world. It, however, can no longer be taken for granted in the circumstances today, when politics has created the sense of majorities based on permanent ascriptive identities.