Legalizing the Revolution: India and the Constitution of the Postcolony

by Sandipto Dasgupta

Genres: India, History, Law

280 pages, Hardcover

Published December 19, 2024

Reviews

[Prez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Constitutionalism in India has been shaped by a sense of celebration-- we were the country that made it out. That despite the several setbacks, our sharp focus towards cultivating an equitable democracy helped us escape major civil wars and revolutions (considering we think about the periphery as some collateral of the violent of the nation building processes). But what was also brought into sharp focus was how the cosmopolitan shaped the post colonial. Even with our revered history of non violent protests, India has never had mass politics in the same way other post colonial nations did. In fact the author seems to argue that this lack was documented in the constitution. The Congress, which was the precursor to the freedom movement, initially had relied heavily on official channels to petition and 'protest'. Till Gandhi managed to organize along mass based ideas, the Congress was severely out of touch and rather elite.
But Gandhi was not a typical mass leader. His organization relied heavily on combatting a collective action problem-- that in order for the 'revolution' to succeed it needed to fit his tight, controlled vision of how it should look like. For instance after the incident at Chauri Chaura, Gandhi called off protests around the country, indicating that he priveleged his ideal of 'revolution' over any kind of mass based politics or identity that could have taken over.
One could say that the nation making enterprise was done by the elite-- a group of liberal lawyers that wanted sophistication over democractic practice. The author seems to believe that in this story of constitution making, you can see how the text is not a text of revolution but one of transformation. This semantic differene is important to the author, because unlike others that have written about the exceptionalism of the leaders and this text, Dasgupta believes that the Congress was not a revolutionary organization, they were a 'government in waiting'. That makes all the difference when you think about the lack of mass based politics in India- a country that is diverse and identitarian. Many ascriptive markers of identity were dissolved to generate a more palatable mass of people that would go through the motions of democracy in order to position India right in the centre of global politics.
This book is interesting and refreshing as it seeks to construct a history of Indian constitutionalism through the lens of those that were written out of almost all narratives- the people of India.