Viswanathan K's Thoughts

During the discussions and debates on the key directions of the Constitution, the leftists wanted the words “socialist” and “secular” in the Preamble. Others bemoaned the absence of Gandhian principles. And another set asked why a reference to a godhead was absent. Ambedkar opposed all of these. (“Socialist” and “secular” would be inserted decades later in 1976 via an amendment).   Part of the reason for opposing the above was that Ambedkar was sceptical on the idea of India even being a nation! Here is his statement on the matter: “In believing we are a nation, we are cherishing great delusion. How can people divided into thousands of castes be a nation?” It was a worry shared by many others, though they would replace “castes” with “languages” and other regional differences. Therefore, believed Ambedkar, we needed a Constitution for a state, the groundwork to establish a nation. Only then could we hope that we would evolve into a nation someday. “The sooner we realize t...

Dignity. There is that (in)famous incident of Gandhi being thrown out from the first-class carriage of a train in South Africa. It led Gandhi to write that Indians had “become the untouchables of South Africa”, says Aakash Singh Rathore in Ambedkar’s Preamble .   It took a “real” untouchable, Ambedkar, to point out that the discrimination Indians faced abroad, while routine and condemnable, was a false analogy to what the untouchables faced in India. After all, pointed out Ambedkar, in South Africa, Gandhi was the boss of several white employees. He had whites as house guests, he dined with white South Africans, he owned property and handled significant amounts of money. Contrast that with what untouchables experienced and suffered back home, pointed out Ambedkar. Hence the charge of the false analogy. As Rathore says: “Only a visa got Dr Ambedkar out of this hostile land that was his homeland, so he could travel abroad, far from the dominion of Brahmanism, and only then enj...

Even before the ink was dry on the Constitution, Ambedkar worried whether the Constitution would survive. To make it stick, to make it impossible to subvert and overthrow, he believed “constitutional morality” had to take root, writes Aakash Singh Rathore in Ambedkar’s Preamble . In his famous appeal on that topic, Ambedkar cautioned: “Constitutional morality is not a natural sentiment. It has to be cultivated. We must realize our people have yet to learn it. Democracy in India is only a top-dressing on an Indian soil, which is essentially undemocratic.” That last part was a shot at the caste system. The democratic principle was equality, whereas the social principle was graded inequality. The former stood for liberty, the latter for fixed occupation.   Constitutional morality was a call to the public officials and public servants to, as Rathore puts it, “transcend the values and principles that they had been imbued with in Indian social life, and adopt the values and princ...

Fraternity. This should be an uncontroversial word in a constitution or preamble, right? But it was not the case, explains Aakash Singh Rathore in Ambedkar’s Preamble . In 1948, Ambedkar introduced this clause: “Fraternity, assuring the dignity of every individual without distinction of caste or creed.” The left-leaning members of the drafting committee were not happy with it. For them, class conflict was the greater problem, not caste conflict, so they wanted “class” to be part of the clause. The right, on the other hand, wanted emphasis on the nation (building) aspect in the clause.   Ambedkar yielded to both groups and the updated clause read: “Fraternity, without distinction of caste, class or creed, so as to assure the dignity of every individual and the unity of the Nation.”   But the Objective Resolution had no mention for fraternity. The Drafting Committee got nervous – were they flirting with danger by not following something framed by Nehru and the Cong...

When the constitution was being framed, many of the members pointed out it was not assigning importance to the village as a unit of governance. Wasn’t that violating Gandhi’s view and input, they asked.   Aakash Singh Rathore’s Ambedkar’s Preamble goes into that. As mentioned in an earlier blog, Ambedkar had fallen out with Gandhi over the forced 1932 Poona Pact where he had to give up on the reservation of constituencies for the lower castes. Ambedkar was dead against the village as the smallest unit of governance because the “village is a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow mindedness and communalism”.   Several members objected to this. Wasn’t this a violation of the principle of local governance, they asked. Ambedkar stood his ground pointing to Gandhi’s own admission, that “You will not understand me if you think about the villages of today… My villages… exist in my imagination”. For an uber-pragmatist like Ambedkar, governance systems could not be based...

The preamble to the constitution. That’s the topic of Aakash Singh Rathore’s Ambedkar’s Preamble . Not the entire constitution, just the preamble. Why a book on just the preamble? The author explains: “The ideas and principles behind a clause can be more important than the mere mechanics of the clause itself.”   It starts with something we don’t even notice this: “WE, THE PEOPLE OF INDIA… IN OUR CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY this twenty-sixth day of November, 1949, do HEREBY ADOPT, ENACT AND GIVE TO OURSELVES THIS CONSTITUTION.” Not 26 January, 1950 (our Republic Day). Instead, 26 November 1949. And if it was ready on that earlier day, why did our Republic Day have to be later?   Therein lies a tale. In 1929, the Congress’ National Session made a call for complete independence. A while later, Gandhi published an article on 26 January 1930 saying India would settle for nothing less than “complete independence”. It was as a callback to that Gandhian demand that the coun...

Someone asked Benjamin Franklin, one of the framers of the American constitution, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” His famous answer was: “A republic, if you can keep it.”   Pranay Kotasthane says Franklin’s response is not understood even today across democracies. Sure, we hear a lot of people talk of democracy being at risk. This is confusing and misleading because the response usually goes something like this, “Elections are happening as scheduled. Power transfer happens peacefully based on the outcome (other than Trump’s supporters running riot when he lost in 2020). In which democracies have any of these things stopped happening? So how exactly is democracy at risk?”   Those who are concerned are not articulating their concern correctly. When they say things like “majority rule is not right”, they don’t seem to realize democracy has always been about the rule of the majority! After all, democracy is a system by which the people who g...

Starting from a little before the 2024 national elections, more and more politicians and a lot of common folks seem very interested in the Constitution. But when you hear them speak on the topic, it is hardly inspiring, as Nitin Pai points out .   One set of Opposition parties equates the Constitution to reservation policies. Pai hits the nail on the head when he says: “Social justice is one of the first objectives of the Indian republic, but a reservation policy is just one of several possible ways to achieve it. It is not hard-coded in the document.” It is also a slippery slope, he says. Very quickly, anyone who opposes reservations will be branded anti-Constitution!   Then there’s the word “socialism”. It was added to the Preamble during the Emergency. The timing of that amendment should make one squirm, but in a polarized country, that’s not what happens. And few remember this: “When asked in 1949 why ‘socialism’ was not written into the Constitution, B....

In Missing in Action , Pranay Kotasthane looks at how the concept of the nation called India evolved at independence. It had to be different from its (British) predecessor for multiple reasons. The predecessor form of government (1) answered to the British Parliament; (2) had limited powers; and (3) was elected by a small electorate. None of these attributes could be retained in independent India, obviously.   Several leaders at the time of Independence felt that society was too mired in regional identities, superstition, caste and religion. They felt that it was the responsibility of the state (independent India) to change society to move away from these tendencies. “The modern Indian constitution in its intent… was fashioned to be a tool not just for an economic and political revolution, but a social revolution.”   One can certainly understand that intent. Inevitably though, the state became increasingly paternalistic – it knew what was good for society and the i...

The constitution. It defines the core principles of how a country should be governed, with which all laws must align. Put differently, the government of the day, no matter how popular it is or how many elected members it has, cannot frame laws that violate the constitution. Sure, one can amend the constitution and then frame new kinds of laws, but amending the constitution isn’t easy. That is by design, a feature of the constitution, not a bug. It ensures core principles of nationhood and governance cannot be overturned or changed too easily. This can be frustrating at times, but it has a deeper reason –nations were formed based on some common values, beliefs and principles. The constitution is way to ensure those core components that brought a nation together don’t get erased easily. Otherwise, the nation could split since many parts may not want to be part of a union that doesn’t care for certain values. Another key point to most democratic constitutions is that they declare the laws...

These words by BR Ambedkar surprised me: “However good a Constitution may be, if those who are implementing it are not good, it will prove to be bad. However bad a Constitution may be, if those implementing it are good, it will prove to be good.” How can “good” people compensate for a “bad” constitution – were they expected to violate the constitution?! Conversely, doesn’t a “good” constitution prevent make it harder for “not good” people to do harm? And since making changes to a constitution is hard, surely a well written constitution is very critical, right? What was Ambedkar thinking, I wondered.   Bibhudutta Pani wrote this piece on some interesting tidbits of the Indian constitution. While the Indian constitution allows for amendments, it also has a Basic Structure Doctrine , i.e., a Lakshman Rekha – the legislature should not meddle with those parts. (They include the preamble, rule of law, fundamental rights, federalism, and secularism).   While there are...

In Privacy 3.0 , Rahul Matthan wonders why the Indian constitution didn’t have any mention of the right to privacy. Was it an oversight or a conscious choice? He went over the transcripts of the Constituent Assembly Debates to find out.   RK Sidhwa’s speech from the time shows he had called for the “secrecy of correspondence be guaranteed”. KT Shah had called for something similar even in 1946 – “privacy of the home”. Prevention of unreasonable search and seizure was almost universally considered necessary by the framers of the constitution.   Why then did none of the above, except the point against unreasonable search and seizure, make it to the constitution? The short answer is – path dependence : “Path dependence is a concept in economics and the social sciences, referring to processes where past events or decisions constrain later events or decisions.” Let me elaborate on that.   Unreasonable search and seizure – almost every Indian, esp. those in...

Alex E. Jones once said: “The answer to 1984 is 1776.” If you don’t like the American slant of that line, feel free to replace 1776 with “a constitution”. And the Internet just made that a whole lot easier. Yes, that’s right: the Internet just made it easy to cross-reference material while you try to be the next BR Ambedkar or Thomas Jefferson. Which makes sense, doesn’t it? After all, with around 160 active constitutions around the globe, there’s a whole lot of material to refer to. The problem (until now) was that each one was written in a different format: so how does one pick and choose parts from each? As Google said in its blog : “Although the process of drafting constitutions has evolved from chisels and stone tablets to pens and modern computers, there has been little innovation in how their content is sourced and referenced.” That is where Google’s partnership with Comparative Constitutions Project comes into the picture. Together, they launched a site called C...

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 ...