The essays in this volume propose a range of methodological perspectives from which these critical debates might be read. Adopting a multidisciplinary approach, they explore themes such as party politics, ideas of rights, including caste and minority rights, social justice and the philosophy of free speech.

An Economist Best Book of the Year How India’s Constitution came into being and instituted democracy after independence from British rule. Britain’s justification for colonial rule in India stressed the impossibility of Indian self-government. And the empire did its best to ensure this was the case, impoverishing Indian subjects and doing little to improve their socioeconomic reality. So when independence came, the cultivation of democratic citizenship was a foremost challenge. Madhav Khosla explores the means India’s founders used to foster a democratic ethos. They knew the people would need to learn ways of citizenship, but the path to education did not lie in rule by a superior class of men, as the British insisted. Rather, it rested on the creation of a self-sustaining politics. The makers of the Indian Constitution instituted universal suffrage amid poverty, illiteracy, social heterogeneity, and centuries of tradition. They crafted a constitutional system that could respond to the problem of democratization under the most inhospitable conditions. On January 26, 1950, the Indian Constitution—the longest in the world—came into effect. More than half of the world’s constitutions have been written in the past three decades. Unlike the constitutional revolutions of the late eighteenth century, these contemporary revolutions have occurred in countries characterized by low levels of economic growth and education, where voting populations are deeply divided by race, religion, and ethnicity. And these countries have democratized at once, not gradually. The events and ideas of India’s Founding Moment offer a natural reference point for these nations where democracy and constitutionalism have arrived simultaneously, and they remind us of the promise and challenge of self-rule today.

Whether the Congress party put forth a clichéd argument of accountability versus stability in defence of a parliamentary system, in haste, to enjoy the plums of office is the debate at the core of this book. The author takes the debate out of the realms of academia and into the homes of general readers. Students of history, political science and law have been fed on works of celebrated authors on the making of the Constitution of India. This is only half the story told. This book captures the disquiet among the members of the Constituent Assembly and outbursts by members of the dominant party that its leaders were 'settling' the Constitution behind closed doors. It examines threadbare the conclusion of many scholars that a great amount of deliberation and debate on merit took place in the Constituent Assembly before arriving at a form of government best suited to India. Proposed meaningful and far-reaching amendments made by some members, whom Ambedkar fondly called the 'rebels', were rejected outright, under one pretext or another, to silence dissent. The post-Independence political history of India bears testimony that the apprehensions voiced by these so-called 'rebels' played out to be true. In the Constituent Assembly, however, their voices, pregnant with a warning, were voices in the wilderness.