To Write a Constitution


One always hears and reads about how the Brit constitution is the only one that was never written, and yet has survived for ages. We also hear about how smart the founding fathers of the US were to come up with a constitution that was radically different from the British one and yet proved resilient enough to last to this day.

With that backdrop, it was interesting to read the history of the Indian constitution: of how far before independence (almost 30-40 years prior to 1947), several Indians had already started thinking of how our constitution should be. Of how they had already evaluated whether it was better to frame a constitution via elected representatives who spoke on behalf of the majority (which inevitably meant leaving out the experts in the field) or via the experts (who usually would not be representative of the people’s preferences). Turns out we decided to do it with a bit of both types! If you wonder whether that made any difference, consider Sri Lanka’s constitution which was written only by experts: it’s been replaced 3 times already. Probably because most people didn’t feel it represented their views and aspirations.

A weird thing about our constitution was that clauses were not pushed through simply by the opinion of the majority of elected representatives. Rather, the policy was to get even the dissenters to agree by discussing and to the extent possible, making concessions, and thus get a universal agreement rather than just a simple majority. Of course, this slowed down things and the whole process took 3 years to complete!

Then again, despite the delay, ours is the only constitution in almost the entire non-Western world that has survived unchanged (in any major way) to this day. Maybe it’s time we start referring to our constitution in the same breath as the Brit and American ones.

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