A framework for politics
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Collection of essays focussing on the Indian Constitution from the perspective of politics
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Nalini Rajan
POLITICS AND ETHICS OF THE INDIAN CONSTITUTION: Edited by Rajeev Bhargava; Oxford University Press, YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi-110001. Rs. 695.
Why do we need a constitution? As Bhargava pertinently points out in the Introduction to this volume, constitutions are expected to check the tyranny of a majoritarian, democratic state and protect vulnerable individuals and groups.
Themes
This book is the outcome of papers presented at a conference on the political philosophy of the Indian Constitution. The topics pertaining to the Constitution are wide-ranging and clearly project a variety of opinions, sometimes incompatible with each other. Included here are essays on the differences (Peter Ronald deSouza) and on similarities (Thomas Pantham) between the visions of Gandhiji and Ambedkar, on changing conceptions of citizenship over the last 50-odd years by Valerian Rodrigues, on the constitution of the Indian identity by Bhikhu Parekh and, more specifically, the Dalit identity by Gopal Guru, Christophe Jaffrelot on the pros and Ashok Acharya on the cons of expanding the scope of caste-based reservations, Gurpreet Mahajan and Pratap Bhanu Mehta on religious minority rights and on representation by Shefali Jha and Rochana Bajpai, and finally, two nuanced contributions on the tensions between democracy and constitutionalism, specifically on the controversial right to property by Sanjay Palshikar, and between the neutral and the interventionist state, or between negative and positive rights by Suhas Palshikar.
Indian secularism
At least three contributors — Upendra Baxi, Aditya Nigam and Nivedita Menon — venture beyond the framework of the Indian Constitution to question its very basis. Upendra Baxi informs us that it is indeed important to go beyond the text of the Indian Constitution in order to include in our purview of justice not only constitutional law or the interpretations of courts, but also those of social movements in civil society. Aditya Nigam, for his part, feels that among the cacophony of voices that dominated the Constituent Assembly debates, only the Nehruvian viewpoint triumphed. To imagine that this perspective was the outcome of a rational Habermasian consensus is both foolish and mistaken. According to Nivedita Menon, multiple readings of the Constitution are possible, and all of them are “situated” in terms of gender, caste and class, and therefore project merely relative truths.
Religion and state
Of special interest to this reviewer are the two essays on religious rights in the last section of the volume. Gurpreet Mahajan points out that the Indian Constitution neither endorses the wall-of-separation (that is, between the state and religion) thesis enshrined in the U.S. Constitution nor the “established state religion” dogma of a theological state like Iran or Saudi Arabia. Nevertheless, the Constitution allows room for religion in the public realm as also for state intervention in religious matters. In other words, Mahajan appears to be in agreement with what Rajeev Bhargava calls “principled distance” between the Indian state and the various religions in civil society in place of “absolute separation.” This, then, is the Indian version of secularism, according to both Mahajan and Bhargava, and this is a constitutional vision to be cherished. Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s perspective on religious rights is slightly different. Mehta suggests that state intervention in religious matters is not confined to India but is the Hobbesian impulse of all democratic states. Even the most liberal states uphold the idea of Thomas Hobbes that the state is the ultimate sovereign which will decide what decisions to take in order to safeguard the interests of its people. Thus the Hobbesian Indian state as moral agent tends to be Janus-faced in matters pertaining to religion by both permitting religious freedoms in the public realm and restraining them in order to uphold morality, health and public order. Of course, what constitutes morality or health or public order will be decided by the state. This is the reason why the Supreme Court in India has attempted — time and again — to do the impossible, namely, define the so-called true essence of an amorphous religion like Hinduism, for example, in the judgement following the famous Satsang case. The petitioners, devotees of the Swami Narayan sect, in this case claimed that the legislation (passed in Bombay in 1947) of permitting untouchables to enter Hindu temples did not apply to them, since they were not Hindus. Paradoxically, the definition of Hinduism as progressive and tolerant, employed in the service of a secular state, is now being used by Hindu right-wing forces to push their agenda for a Hindu state.
All in all, this is a fascinating book precisely because the contributors are political scientists and philosophers who are concerned not merely with theoretical abstractions, but with the application of theory to a specific context, namely, the Indian Constitution. As Bhargava tells us in his Introduction, previous work on constitutional theory has largely ignored the Indian context.
This volume is a successful attempt to put the Indian constitutional experience on the world map of contemporary politics.
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