Constitution and its Discontents: Taking the Constitution seriously as a political document

“The historiography of Indian nationalism has for a long time been dominated by elitism -colonialist elitism and bourgeois nationalist elitism…Both these varieties of elitism share the prejudice that the making of the Indian nation and the development of the consciousness -nationalism - which informed this process were exclusively and predominantly elite achievement.”

• Ranjit Guha, ‘On Some Aspects of Historiography of Colonial India’

THE ELITIST HISTORIOGRAPHY of Indian nationalism has, within itself, several erasures and omissions. These erasures are also evident in our constitutional history,where the elite protagonists and their liberal achievement in the form of the Constitution obscure several difficult questions pertaining to subaltern minority groups, such as religious minorities, disabled and queer people. 

A critical approach to the Constitution has predominantly focused on reading it from a liberal democratic framework. The exclusion of minorities from the Constitution has, therefore, been seen as an inevitable but rectifiable failure emanating from state policies and not as a failure of the Constitution itself. Here, we argue that the Constitution has been structured in a way that it excludes minority voices, which are considered ‘deviant’ from the ‘mainstream society’. There were alternative imaginations that failed to find a place in the document.  

In the ‘un-historical historiography’ that valorizes elite Indian nationalist figures as the heralds of the nationalist movement, there is an erasure of subaltern classes and their role in the independence struggle, as well as of their attempts to become meaning-makers in the constitutional discourse. 

Two epistemic provocations served as our trigger for interrogating this question. The first, Prof. G. Mohan Gopal’s provocation - the ‘Brahminical fiction about the Constitution’ - wherein he asserts that the dominant authors of constitutional discourse in India are Brahmins, and the second, an equally forceful epistemic provocation by Prof. Saroj Giri, who suggests that ‘Indian Constitution displaced radical possibilities.’  

We take these provocations in a democratic spirit and attempt to interrogate the discontents of religious minorities, sexual subalterns and embodied minorities such as the disabled regarding the Constitution. 

The Indian Constitution and the exclusion of minority aspirations

Mathew John argues that the quest for Indian independence was more about disproving the British idea that India would be too deeply divided to be a modern liberal state, rather than contesting or challenging the inherently flawed ideas. The dominant voice at the time, the Indian National Congress, did not contest this linkage of constitutional identity to nationhood and worked towards the realisation of a nation that the British denied, even when the majority of the country disagreed with the coloniser casting itself as a pedagogue, stewarding people to eventual nationhood.