Reading of the Indian Constitution

Dipankar Sinha

t seems that postcolonial Indias fate is to forever remain on tenterhooks having witnessed not just one but two paradigmatic transitions in its notso-old life. The rst transition from the colonial rule to constitutional rule coinciding with the birth of postcolonial India has been marked by a bewildering variety of negotiations, tensions, dilemmas, paradoxes and contradictions.While Indias case is not the sole instance in this regard, her experience has been particularly challenging and problematic, if not for anything else but for the sheer number, spread and depth of contentious issues and factors to be addressed. Then again, before the dust of the rst transition could settle down, the second one would emerge with Indias much-controversial but much lessdebated entry to the domain of marketled development. The book under review deals overwhelmingly with the rst transition while acknowledging the connection between the two. It is broadly divided into two sections The Juridical-Political Route to Norms of Governance and Paradigms of Inequality, Pathways to Entitlement with instances of shuttling back and forth between the two. At the very outset the editors note that they seek to explore the congurations of power and legitimacies of the emerging constitutional India, with particular focus on the developmentalist structures and paradigms, which provide the context for the transition and the establish ment of the postcolonial state. Indeed, the whole process was multifaceted, involving an enthusiastic but exploratory, if not uncertain, search for identity not just for the nation but also for its people. It was a process that would compel the leaders of the newlyindependent country to confront the complex task of constructing the statesociety interface in general and, more

book review
Political Transition and Development Imperatives in India edited by Ranabir Samaddar and Suhit K Sen (New Delhi and Abingdon: Routledge), 2012; pp viii + 296, Rs 795.

specically, involving the negotiation of governance and development under a legal regime. Vitally important and sensitive items like sovereignty, rights and citizenship with no easy correspondence between governance and democracy would come up. A caveat: the decision not to critique modernity and its claim to universality in this otherwise deftlycrafted introduction has its toll because such a critique would have left more epistemological and axiological cues vis--vis the universal ideology of developmentalism and its negotiation with ground reality. Encounter with Legalities Ranabir Samaddars essay with its focus on two constitutional tasks the setting up of the Indian state and the Indian government can be traced back to his earlier works such as A Biography of the Indian Nation 1947-97. In the essay Samaddar brings to the fore from a remarkably different vantage point Indian democracys encounter with legalities with Ambedkar, the chief architect of the Indian Constitution at the centre stage, in blow hot-blow cold exchange of insights and rhetoric with T T Krishnamachari and Thakurdas Bhargava, among others. With lengthy excerpts from the Constituent Assembly debates, Samaddar gradually reveals the nuances of the process of construction of the prime principles of governing India and their implications for the right-bearing citizens. The respective frictions and anxiety of the rst stake in ensuring juridical authority of the state and the second
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stake in legally constituting a government and a people, and those of the two stakes combined, would take diverse forms like lack of balance between state power and government power, and an array of undemocratic elements in the construction of a democratic polity, including the unilateral imposition of expertise (as in the power to provide nal immunity of law and in making exceptions to the rules). It was no easy task for the new leadership as they had to come face-to-face with the reality of divergence between their own radical ideas and rhetoric of nation-building of the colonial era and the later compulsions of self-governance. The interplay of the abstraction and the reality (the latter, however, relative) sought to produce a specic genre of governance and public power constructed by rationalising techniques. In asserting that the constitutional gaze provides rights to the people but does not provide righteousness, Samaddar not only gives a new twist to the emerging debate but also provocatively notes the emergence of new postcolonial politics in which the political subject is a product of legality, non-legality and illegalities. Samaddar iterates his faith in dialogue vis--vis the Constitution and new illegalities, yet he observes that all is not well with micro-level dialogue. The essay provides possibilities of extending the parameters of various concepts like deliberative democracy and political society just when they are threatened with some kind of theoretical dead end, but at the same time, it leaves the solution tantalisingly open, and justiably so. Harbinger of Development If there is discussion on the rationalities and technologies of governance vis--vis the rst political transition and development, the Nehruvian state cannot be far behind. Benjamin Zachariahs essay relieves the readers of the axiomatic bind of the Nehruvian state as the harbinger of development, which marks many of the writings on Indians development scenario. He problematises the
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development imagination which had been zealously promoted with a view to showcase the legitimacy of the Indian state. In explaining the manoeuvring of the Nehruvian state in injecting our values to the people within its borders and restricting civic inclusion, Zachariah harps on civic belonging rather than the more-familiar civic nationalism thereby adding a new dimension to the dominant good civic, bad ethnic logic. The suction-mechanism of the overdominant, hyperactive Indian state, which would poke its Pinocchio-like nose in almost every sphere of peoples life has come out well in the essay revealing the ways and means through which (civic) philosophical, ideological and policy dimensions, by aunting legitimation as the trump card, enforced limits to civic inclusion. However, the conscious disengagement of nation and state may leave out some vital dimensions of the exclusionary strategies, especially the marginalisation of the other, of the state. Also, the essay could have discussed the norm-laden symbols and images of the Nehruvian state, which form part of the political language. Suhit K Sen has an unconventional take on the internal tensions, contestations and ambivalences of the Congress Party during its transition from the domain of movement to that of governance in the under construction Nehruvian state. The party, which would take pride in having unilaterally led India to freedom, would also have a tryst with its own destiny, not exactly of a comfortable kind. The formation of ground rules of the emerging political system would be marked by continuous tension between the Congress Party and the Congress government(s) at the centre and at other levels. In this process, as Sen shows, while the government-centric ministerialists would seek to ward off the interference of the party in the day-to-day functioning of government, their colleagues in the party organisation would, in exploring a new motive force for the party after achieving freedom, prefer to steer the newly-established government. Sen provides an intense account of the intraparty tussle of personalities and groups
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from 1946-57 but to what extent the party was faced with this dilemma remains an issue that requires further introspection because from the very beginning the balance was overwhelmingly tilted in favour of the ministerialists, vested directly with the power of governing and having the gentle colossus Nehru at the helm of affairs. Politics of Development In the second section Ashutosh Kumars essay is a surprising inclusion as it is more concerned with the second transition than the rst. The essay explores the predicaments of key political parties vis--vis their encounter with electoral politics in the specic context of the adoption and ascendance of neoliberal market reforms. The theme is relevant in understanding the Indian politys uneasy negotiations between participatory democracy and market economy, both having coincided in the early 1990s. Referring to election manifestos and some survey data, Kumar tracks the dual compulsions of the imperatives of neo-liberal governance and the increasing disapproval, if not outright resistance, of the people and the consequent strategisation of major parties like the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party. Kumar refers to the disconnect bet ween the two developments and bemoans the lack of debate on such a huge paradigmatic shift. We would add that such an outcome was to be so, both symbolically and strategically, from the very beginning because market reforms were adopted in 1991 by a government lacking the majority status in Parliament, which also resorted to the TINA (There Is No Alternative) logic seeking to severely restrict public debates on market reforms. However, it did not work much because ordinary people, notwithstanding their lack of knowledge of the technicalities of neo-liberal reforms, continue to articulate dissent in various ways. The severely constricted space and scope of debate, which paradoxically characterise the act of governance of the largest democracy in the world is not necessarily situation-specic, it has also been encoded in the very constitutive logic of the constitutional jurisprudence.
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If Samaddar had set the ball rolling in his essay, Kalpana Kannabiran takes the cue, especially that of constitutional communication, and takes up an emerging but still largely underresearched theme of disability. Substantiating her contentions with slices of articles and case laws, she reveals how the blind spots of the apparently inclusive and harmonious framing of Indian constitutional jurisprudence unleashes a process of depoliticisation when it comes to the reading of non-discrimination in general, and the discourse on discrimination based on disability in particular. Such codication and the construction of a zone of silence are not crude but a very rened process. These rest on the highly valued ambit of equality before law and equal opportunity on the one hand, and less evidently, but no less strongly, on measuring disability against able-bodied norms. Kannabiran reverses the dominant trend in the disability analysis by problematising ability and rescuing disability from the taken-forgranted tag of problem. The arrowhead of Swarna Rajagopalans contribution is female infanticide. While her locale is Tamil Nadu, the essays critical tenor has two questions of much broader relevance: Whose security? Whose development?. The major focus of the essay is on the campaign mode, a communicative exercise that can reveal a lot of things challenging our preset assumptions. Rajagopalan thus highlights a lot of issues emerging from the interplay of human security, human development and human rights, especially the issue of gender violence, while she interrogates the efcacy of democratic governance by exposing its underlying techno-managerial orientation. In the

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process, she also raises the vital point that the detachment and mutual indifference of the state and civil society groups do little good for the welfare of ordinary people. Ratan Khasnabis takes off with the standard Marxian political economy approach in his analysis of the evolution of the rules of governance in rural India. Beyond the much-discussed plot of class contradictions and elite manipulations of the Indian state in the Nehruvian period, the essay becomes particularly interesting in the context of the neoliberal era. Khasnabis shows how rural India, especially its local government institutions, are subject to a kind of governing strategy in which their participatory character would be stressed but within the limits of the Lakshman rekha drawn by the ruling elite in order to ensure that the existing hegemonic order

is not disturbed by any radical change. Khasnabis sharpens his analysis by referring to the tension and predicament caused by the decline in the agendasetting power of political parties on the one hand and their compulsion of popular mobilisation on the other. In doing so he does a good job in dealing with the parliamentary parties, including the mainstream Left, but remains a bit too soft on the extra-parliamentary Left, particularly the Maoists, who are yet to come up with an alternative development agenda, while they ght the violence and repression of mainstream development with counter-violence. Conclusion It was known that the formation of the Indian republic and the establishment of stable rules and institutions could never be a one-shot affair. But gradually,

the classic works of Granville Austin, the juridico-political writings of Upendra Baxi and the more recent one by Ananya Vajpayee (The Righteous Republic) have sensitised us from different but related vantage points to the ramications and implications of the intense, and often excruciating, exercise in constitutionalism and the making of the Indian Constitution and the republic. The present volume makes its own contribution to this admirable intellectual trajectory by facilitating the reading of the Indian Constitution not as a sacrosanct document preserved high above but as something of our own rooted in development imperatives and their everyday groundlevel manifestations.
Dipankar Sinha (sinhadipankar2007@gmail. com) is associated with the Department of Political Science, University of Calcutta.

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