India has had no revolutions- i.e. there has never been a violent overthrow of the Government by its own people. In 1947, there was a peaceful transfer of power. Nehru was already the Prime Minister, and he remained the Prime Minister. He requested the Viceroy to stay on as Governor General. There were some crazy Commies who hoped to overthrow Nehru and seize power, but they were soon beaten into submission. India, it turned out, was good at killing revolutionaries which is why it hasn't had a revolution. It must be said, some Commies were sissies- people like Balraj Sahni or Majrooh Sultanpuri- and after a spell of porridge, were happy enough to make money working in Bombay's dream factory.
A stupid academic, Sandipto Dasgupta- an Assistant Professor at the New School- doesn't understand that India did not have a revolution because, first the Brits, and then, after Independence, Nehru and his successors killed or incarcerated revolutionaries. No doubt, Indian politicians- like JP Narayan- may have spoken of bringing about a 'total revolution' (sampoorna kranti) but they were stupid liars. They merely wanted to topple one corrupt and incompetent administration and replace it with something as bad or worse. Sadnip writes-
There is a problem that any aspiring scholar of the Indian Constitution must face,
that problem has to do with learning constitutional law and studying various drafts and deliberations which resulted in different Government of India acts.
but which remains, more often than not, unacknowledged. In the voluminous literature narrating the triumph of the Indian people against the mighty British Empire there exists a curious absence: the word “revolution”.
It is not absent. There were revolutionaries of various stripes. They were killed or incarcerated. That's why there was no 'revolution'. Instead, there was a peaceful transfer of power. True, there was a unilateral aspect to it- because Indians could not agree amongst themselves and so the Brits tended to impose whatever seemed workable. Still, at a later point, the India did give itself a Constitution which incorporated some Irish ideas and was of a unitary type.
One frequently comes across the phrases “independence movement” or “freedom struggle”.
One also comes across revolutionaries who sought to wage war against the King Emperor, or- after Independence- who sought to overthrow the Indian State which they considered 'bourgeois' and 'reactionary'. But those revolutionaries were either killed or locked up or otherwise dissuaded from making too much of a nuisance of themselves.
Yet “revolution” – a term oft-used in the modern political vocabulary to describe an epochal shift in the life of a polity – is conspicuous by its absence from the historical consciousness of Indians when they talk about the end of two centuries of colonial domination and the birth of the world’s largest democracy.
Because Nehru was PM before and after Independence. Mountbatten, it is true, stopped being Viceroy. But he became the Governor General of India (but not Pakistan).
Whatever terms the new postcolonial political actors chose to describe themselves, “revolutionaries” was rarely one of them.
Unless they were old Ghaddarites or Commies or had engaged in violence during the Quit India movement. Had the Japanese won, Bose- as a puppet 'Rashtrapati'- would have been described as the leader of the Indian Revolution.
Perhaps the most paradigmatic case of twentieth century decolonisation left behind no “memory” or “spirit” of the revolution.
Because the various revolutionary movements had been crushed before and after Independence.
This curious case of the missing revolution is critical to any analysis of the Indian Constitution.
It is wholly irrelevant. The Indian Constitution builds on the British Government of India Act of 1935. It did not follow a Revolutionary War- as in America- and the defeat of the former Imperial power.
This is due to the fact that modern constitutions are inextricably tied up with revolutions.
Not in South Asia. The Brits departed willingly. They were not thrown out by revolutionary armies.
Revolutions – the extraordinary events that disrupt the quotidian passage of political time –
The Second World War was even more extraordinary. India could have become a Japanese slave state. Thankfully, Churchill and Roosevelt defended India.
forge new principles for social and political futures.
But those 'new principles' may be swiftly discarded. That's what happened after the French Revolution.
Constitutions then institutionalise those principles, giving concrete shape to those imagined futures.
Some may claim this is the case, but those who do so are lying.
The bearer and author of these imaginaries is another distinctly modern protagonist: “the People”.
Because prior to 1776, people did not exist- right?
Forged through revolutionary struggle, a disparate population becomes a People,
None did so. The French were already French. The Americans were already Americans. As for the Bolshevik Revolution it so signally failed that even Russian speaking Ukrainians are fighting Putin's hordes.
who can collectively identify themselves as a “We”.
This nutter thinks Blacks and 'Red Indians' identified with Washington and Jefferson.
The People are then the preeminent subject of bourgeois revolutions,
Nope. The bourgeoisie are the preeminent subjects of bourgeois revolutions. By 'People' is meant 'people like us'- not dark skinned slaves or indigenous people of a different ethnicity.
and consequently as the author of constitutions are universally recognised as the one true constituent subject.
Rubbish! An American slave or 'Red Indian' who tried to claim any such status would have been laughed at and then whipped or otherwise killed.
Most texts require an author. A text as authoritative as the constitution cannot do without one.
This nutter doesn't know that England has an unwritten constitution. So do Israel and New Zealand. So what? It makes no fucking difference.
Every constitution, including the Indian one, must therefore include some form of the declarative identification of “We, the People” as the author of the text.
Rubbish! Saudi Arabia's constitution mentions Allah and the Quran and the monarch. It does not mention the people of that Kingdom.
The case of the missing revolution therefore inescapably leads to the related mystery of authorial identity.
There is none in the case of America, Ireland, India etc. The guys who created the thing revealed their names.
Following one of the largest mass struggles in history, India achieved its independence without a revolutionary rupture.
Because the British were happy- indeed, in a hurry- to leave. The fact is, Britain, not India, experienced 'revolutionary' changes in the post-war years.
This is not a simple reiteration of the oft-repeated point about colonial continuity. Rather, it is to highlight a certain mindset that prevailed among the constitution makers.
Many of them were lawyers or legislators. They weren't shitheads like Sudipto who teaches shit.
They were not meeting as the representatives of a victorious party
Most of them were. They had been elected or were nominated by victorious parties.
of a revolution
because there was no fucking revolution.
or different factions of a civil war, or even participants in a negotiated settlement. At the beginning of the Constituent Assembly, Nehru invoked the Tennis Court Oath promulgated by the members of the French Third Estate in 1789.
At that time (Dec. 1946) Partition did not seem inevitable. Nehru was willing to stipulate for provincial autonomy, if not dual sovereignty, as the Brits wished. Later he ensured the Constitution was unitary.
Whereas the French revolutionaries resolved to draft a constitution regardless of whether it received the blessing of legality from the existing monarchical order, the Indian constitution makers worked under the untroubled shadow of legal authority bestowed by an Act of the British Parliament.
Consequently, they never had to draw upon claims of revolutionary or extra-legal legitimacy. Neither were they directly elected by the “People” to write a constitution in their name.
Rubbish! The Indian Constitution borrowed an Irish expedient to make itself 'autochthonous' and thus establish a new 'grundnorm' wholly unconnected with any laws made outside its own soil.
When their lack of representativeness was pointed out, BR Ambedkar – Dalit leader and chairman of the Constituent Assembly – would argue that their legitimacy was based on the “wisdom and knowledge” they brought, which were most likely superior to any representatives chosen on the basis of universal franchise.
He later dismissed his contribution as 'hack work'. He was right. The Burmese came out with a more Left wing constitution much more quickly than the verbose Indians.
Many of them alternated as members of interim government, and government departments sent detailed notes on possible constitutional provisions.
The Indian Constitution is very very long and very very boring. Still, it can be amended any which way and thus doesn't greatly matter.
Congress had been the government-in-waiting for around a decade by this point.
Congress/Khilafat could have got Independence in 1924.
The concerns of governance were no longer fully separated from the project of creating a constitutional structure.
They never have been.
Theirs was a project of governance, of which drafting the Constitution was the first, most significant, step.
No. Like Israel, the Indians could have abandoned the exercise if more pressing matters had arisen.
The constituent and the administrative standpoint were never fully distinct.
They had never been distinct. This cretin doesn't get that Constituent Assemblies are Legislatures.
The Constitution recognised “We, the People” as its author and creator.
Did you know that Ambedkar was a person? Most people thought he was a pussy cat.
In 1937, Nehru had said, “[t]he Constituent assembly that we demand will come into being only as the expression of the will and the strength of the Indian people; it will function when it has sanctions behind it to give effect to its decisions without reference to outside authority. It will represent the sovereignty of the Indian people and will meet as the arbiter of our destiny.” Yet the people were conspicuous by their absence in the Assembly.
Nonsense! The people had voted for Nehru and his chums. That's how parliamentary democracy works. It isn't the case that every fucking American showed up for the drafting of their Constitution. They sent delegates.
There was no direct election to select the members,
Congress had won the 1946 election fair and square. The vast majority of Hindus backed it.
nor any protracted public debates on the nature of the Constitution.
Because Constitutions don't fucking matter. That's why the Brits never bothered to write one down for themselves.
There were no Federalist Papers, no referendum campaigns, no participatory forums.
There was no need. There had been elections in 1937 and then again in 1946. That was good enough.
Unlike the French or Mexican constituent assemblies, the proceedings were never disrupted by petitioning groups of citizens.
Because Indians knew that the Constitution didn't matter. True, some Judge thought 'freedom of expression' meant exactly that but the Constitution was very quickly amended so as to make it clear that India wasn't America.
Instead, the people were present in the Assembly in another guise: as a population and as subjects to be made into citizens.
Nope. Nobody gave a shit about them. That's why there was no provision for free and compulsory education or a literacy test to get the vote.
They were the inhabitants of a society to be modernised;
Fuck off! A bunch of Gandhian nutters in dhotis who put in a Directive Principle about Cow Protection were clearly not interested in 'modernization'.
actors in an economy to be developed.
An economy to be fucked over- more like.
They were conceived of as the protagonists of a democracy to come and instability to be avoided. They were the “starving people” and “naked masses” – and it was the “first task” of the Assembly to see to it that they were clothed and fed.
With what? India didn't have enough food or clothing or anything else. Nehru had to go beg for food from Truman. Since Mao- an actual revolutionary- had taken over China ten days previously, Truman was initially cordial enough. But Nehru wasn't the American type of politician- i.e. a deal maker- and so nothing came of it.
The Constituent Assembly had come into being through a long struggle, but without a revolutionary disruption. Unlike the American founders, who spoke of being faithful to the “late revolution”, Indian constitution-makers spoke of revolution in the Assembly – and they spoke of it often – as a future occurrence. In their own minds, they found themselves not at the end, but on the “eve of revolutionary changes”.
So, they didn't mean revolution but evolution of a transformative sort.
The challenge for them was how to carry out a revolution (through the Constitution) to avoid a revolution (on the ground).
No. The challenge for them was how to pass the time while the police or the Army killed or incarcerated revolutionaries of any description.
Or, to see it from another angle, how to transpose (the threat of ) a revolution into a controlled and procedurally guided transformation – “a peaceful transference of society” as a member put it in the Constituent Assembly.
If the Brits could fuck up revolutionaries with ease, why should the Indians not do so with even greater ease?
Looking back on the work done by the Assembly, Nehru would later remark: “People seem to think of revolution as a big war, or a big internal struggle, violent struggle. Rather, revolution is something which changes the structure of the society, the lives of the people, the way they live and the way they work. That is what is happening in India.”
No it wasn't. India, under Nehru, grew less able to feed or defend itself. Ultimately, it became a dynastic shithole which sensible people ran the fuck away from.
It had to be a revolution without a revolution.
Which is like being a cat which is a dog which is an umbrella you lost in 1987.
And the Assembly had to build the architecture for it.
Writing shite aint architecture. It's just writing shite.
This was the architecture of an ambitious social transformation through the Constitution. Ambedkar’s much quoted speech at the concluding sessions of the Assembly provides the outline of this project. “If we wish to maintain democracy not merely in form, but also in fact, what must we do?” Ambedkar asked.
Kill Commies. The Americans warmed to Nehru & Co once they saw that the Indian Government was better at this than the Chinese KMT.
The...thing we must do is not to be content with mere political democracy.
Which was shitty enough. Still, back then, there was a theory that Communism could make a country prosperous. Then it was discovered that Secular Socialism was a recipe for corruption and dynasticism so that's what we got stuck with.
We must make our political democracy a social democracy as well. Political democracy cannot last unless there lies at the base of it social democracy...On the 26th of January 1950 [the day the Constitution was to be adopted] we are going to enter into a life of contradictions.
Still, it took two decades to get rid of the Princes and their privy purses.
In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality. In politics we will be recognising the principle of one man one vote and one vote one value. In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man one value. How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions? How long shall we continue to deny equality in our social and economic life? If we continue to deny it for long, we will do so only by putting our political democracy in peril. We must remove this contradiction at the earliest possible moment or else those who suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of political democracy which this Assembly has so laboriously built up.
Ambedkar's solution was to strip Muslim Dalits of affirmative action. He wasn't a fool. He knew that 'those who suffered from inequality' in India would soon suffer from being beaten to death if they tried to blow anything up. Still, it was in his interest to pretend to be a Leftitst.
Ambedkar’s speech captures the central themes of the constitutional project.
No. The Burmese Constitution was left wing. India's was not. The Communist threat could be easily contained. What if Hindu and Sikh Princes joined hands with the Mahasabha and made common cause against the Muslims and the supposedly pro-Muslim Nehru? In that case, Congress would split. The army might switch sides. Indeed, India might become a loose federation. The integration of the Princely States might come unstuck.
There is the acknowledgement that the social basis for “political democracy” in India is fragile and unstable.
The social basis didn't matter. The poor were too weak to do fuck all. Commie nutters could be easily beaten to death though most of them were sissies like Balraj Sahni.
Ambedkar recognised that mere political freedom brought about by the end of colonial rule or the granting of political and civil rights that followed liberal constitutional models of yesteryear meant little on their own.
He recognized that the Constitution didn't mean shit. Maybe converting to Buddhism- the ultimate Aryan religion- was the best way forward for his people.
The Constitution had to – because it should and also because it must – be concerned with the social question.
Laws are meaningless unless the resources exist for their enforcement. It is all very well to pass a law compelling the rich to feed the poor and suck them off on a regular basis. But if the rich people hire guys to kill and rob anybody they like, then there's fuck all you can do about it. Revolutions are about killing or chasing away those seeking to enforce the law. But the claims made by revolutionaries regarding the laws they will enact have nothing to do with the horrible shite they get up to after it has occurred.
Transforming the social condition – i.e. planned and managed social revolution – had to be its orienting principle.
So he said but, it turned out, nobody was interested in his doing any fucking orienting. Without the Brits, he had no political constituency. Neither did his pal, J.N Mandal, who had opted for Pakistan- where Jinnah made him Law Minister- though he soon had to run away.
Describing the central challenge of this constitutional project, Nehru had reminded his Congress colleagues that “we have bigger decisions to take, graver choices before us, than those of lawyers’ making”.
The Constitution was unitary rather than federal. But in many other respects it was ambiguous. That was because nobody could be sure the Prince's might not suddenly shake off their torpor and display political savvy. Nehru also didn't trust the industrialists who had financed Congress. He used an extra-constitutional body- viz. the Planning Commission- to concentrate power in the PMO. It is important to remember that Nehruvian Socialism was wholly unconnected with Ambedkar or any of the other framers of the Constitution.
Now some of the most well-known legal and administrative minds in the Assembly had to author a script for a revolutionary transformation – incorporating those “grave choices” – in a specifically juridical language.
This did not happen. The 'juridical language' is conservative and builds on previous, British era, constitutional law.
Acknowledging the absence of closures that “late revolutions” are meant to provide, Indian constitution-makers had to task themselves with scripting futures uncertain.
No. They just had to come up with something long and boring which didn't spook anybody. That is why they borrowed some ideas from Da Valera's Ireland- e.g. the notion of 'Directive Principles'.
This scripting demanded a particular kind of author,
of a kind which already existed
given the absence of a “People” forged through a revolution.
'People' aren't forged through a revolution. That's why, after a Revolution, so many of 'the People' have to run the fuck away. About 70,000 'Loyalists' had to emigrate from the US after the Revolution.
That author was the administrator,
Nope. These guys were mainly lawyers turned politicians.
possessing their own sophisticated repertoire of language, techniques and methods of calculations that had developed globally through the nineteenth and twentieth century. In the case of India, their skills had been honed specifically in the administrative laboratory that was the colonial regime.
B.N Rau, it is true, was an ICS man. But he was on the judicial side. Incidentally, he also helped draft the Burmese constitution which was left of center.
The administrative standpoint and its significance regarding the formulation of the Constitution has rarely been afforded the analytical centrality it deserves in our understanding of the document.
The Constitution incorporated some elements from the Gazette and this has been the subject of analysis by lawyers representing government employees sacked for corruption, rape, murder etc. What this cretin means is that useless shitheads like him- who aren't lawyers or are as stupid as Gautam fucking Bhatia- have preferred to talk bollocks about Revolution rather than admit the Indian Constitution is as boring as shit. It is also poorly drafted- which is cool because this means more money for lawyers.
An interesting example of this relegation is Ambedkar’s phrase “constitutional morality”,
which was supposed to give comfort to the Princes and property owners and foreign investors
which has gained prominence in recent decades in scholarly as well as judicial interpretations of the constitution.
Sadly, this is in the context of denying what the Americans call 'the doctrine of judicial question'. But this tends to erode 'separation of powers'. For example, the Bangladeshi Bench reinstituted quotas of a type which Sheikh Hasina, responding to a student agitation, had abolished in 2018. This led to a Revolution. Currently, the students have forced the Chief Justice to resign. No separation of powers means that the heads of Judges can roll just as easily as the heads of politicians.
The contemporary reading of Ambedkar’s comments, focused on the conjunction of the terms “constitution” and “morality”, view him as advancing a normative liberal standard to aspire to.
No. The contemporary reading is 'High Caste Hindus are very evil. Dalits should ally with Muslims and destroy Sanatan Dharma'. That is 'constitutional morality'.' There may be other readings- e.g. Judges should abolish death- more especially for my pussy cat. Why they are doing so? It is due they are very immoral. Constitution is rebuking them and saying 'barkhurdar, itni constitutional immortality mat karna. Dekho, is bacchi ki billi marne vali hai. Kindly abolish death for nice pussycat futt a futt! '
Did you know, British introduced law of gravity, not to mention everybody having to die, to India so as to split Hindus from Muslims? Dr. Ambedkar Sahib was seeing through this naughtiness of the British. He writed very nice Constitution but High Caste is not understanding gud. That is why trillions of bahishkrit Muslims are being sodomized every day by Narendra Modi (real name Nicholas Maugham). Thus, BJP is carrying on traditions of Viceroys like Curzon (real name Kasturba Gandhi Marg).
According to this interpretation, constitutional government requires not just adherence to the collection of rules in a document, but certain norms of political action and an orientation towards certain values.
In other words, any nutter can claim that ruling party is very evil due to it is not abolishing death- at least for my pussy cat. Also, the fact that Viceroy Curzon, who partitioned Bengal, was actually a Gujarati lady named Kasturba Gandhi Marg has been suppressed by High Caste Macaulay's bastards.
This was considered as a wise – and to many contemporary readers prescient – reminder that constitutionalism should be viewed as a part of a larger constellation of “liberal” values that the post-colonial polity should aspire to embody.
Why bother? A country should aspire to feed and defend itself before it aspires to embodying stupid shite.
However, the context of Ambedkar’s speech makes it clear that his goal in pointing out the absence of certain norms of political behaviour was not to make a case for their cultivation, but rather to explain how their absence had shaped the Constitution’s drafting process.
He was saying 'Indians are shit.'
In other words, his focus was not the desirability of “constitutional morality”, but the challenge of coping with its absence.
a challenge caused by the fact that Indians are shit.
Ambedkar’s intervention began as a response to criticism that the Constitution borrowed far too much from the Government of India Act, 1935, the putative “constitution” of the colonial government which became the blueprint for nearly two-thirds of the Constitution.
Since White peeps drafted it, at least two thirds of the Constitution would not be shit.
He stressed that such borrowings “relate mostly to the details of administration”.
Because, Indians- being shit- had been administered by Brits. Thus, the safest thing was to copy whatever they had written down relating to 'details of administration'.
However, should “details of administration” find a place in a Constitution meant to be a document outlining basic and fundamental principles?
Yes. Indian lawyers and judges would have preferred to refer to the Indian Constitution rather than the British Government of India Act when deciding cases involving the corruption and criminality of various officials.
Ambedkar agreed that normally “administrative details should have no place in the Constitution”, and that he wished the Drafting Committee “could see its way to avoid their inclusion in the Constitution”. However, in this case, there was a “necessity which justifies their inclusion”.
What was it? The answer is obvious and as I have stated.
It is in the context of this “necessity” that Ambedkar then quotes George Grote, the Victorian era historian of Ancient Greece. In his monumental A History of Greece, Grote had argued that rather than a mindless “mob-rule”, Athenian democracy did succeed in cultivating a “constitutional morality”.
Ambedkar was taking a dig at Gandhi who appealed to the stupid and ignorant.
More generally, and this is what was important for Ambedkar, “constitutional morality” was the “indispensable condition of a government at once free and peaceable”.
i.e. Satyagraha and the spinning wheel are useless. Ambedkar considered Gandhi's assassination a blessing in disguise.
The critical element of “constitutional morality” was “a paramount reverence for the forms of the Constitution”.
Which sprang from being White not Brown. Gandhi was a nutter. Indians should quit believing in his nostrums.
A respect for the “forms” of the Constitution would mean a willingness for contending interests to fight their battles in constitutional terms –
I suppose this cretins means 'respect for the law' means acting only in a legal manner with respect to your adversary. Constitutional instruments are source of law. But they are not the only ones. In any case, it could be said that both Jinnah and Nehru had respect for the 'forms' of the Constitution. What they disagreed upon was whether India should remain united or whether it should be partitioned. Direct Action Day and then Liaquat's conduct as Finance Minister decided the outcome.
even if accepting such formal constraints might lead to less favourable outcomes than they might have hoped for.
Equally, the constraint of having your head kicked in leads to your acceptance of pretty unfavorable outcomes.
The point of the transformational constitution was to bring the agenda of social transformation – one that would substantially heighten the stakes of contestations – within the constitutional framework.
It was already there. The 1935 Act had provision for affirmative action, land redistribution etc.
Ensuring that this would happen was a major factor in the minds of the constitution-makers – informing the designs of institutions and the arrangement of legal power.
No. They wanted to ensure that the Princes and foreign investors wouldn't get spooked. This was a conservative document- unlike the Burmese constitution.
The force of “necessity” came from the fact that one could not presume the existence of “constitutional morality” in India.
because Indians are shit.
“Constitutional morality is not a natural sentiment,” warned Ambedkar. Rather: “It has to be cultivated. We must realise that our people have yet to learn it.”
They learned nonsense from the Mahacrackpot
“Democracy”, Ambedkar remarked, noting the lack of hegemonic consensus forged through a social revolution, “was only a top dressing on an Indian soil that was essentially undemocratic”.
Because Indians were shit. The Brits were the 'top dressing' which kept the place safe.
And this reality harked back to the issue that prompted the discussion of “constitutional morality” in the first place – the place of administrative details in the constitution: “[I]t is only where people are saturated with Constitutional morality [...] that one can take the risk of omitting from the Constitution details of administration.”
In other words, the Constitution should specify that the Army should fight rather than decide to go on a fast till the enemy retreats.
If the authors of the constitution failed to reflect on those details as they went about their task, the Constitution could end up “inconsistent and opposed” to its original “spirit”.
Two thirds of it was taken from the Tory 1935 Act.
The high-stakes project of creating a constitutional structure that was flexible and expansive enough to realise a transformational project in social conditions that were neither cohesive nor stable required a particular kind of risk assessment.
No. The Constitution did not matter in the slightest. Neither did the Judiciary. India would be ruled the way it had always been ruled. The Army mattered. The Police mattered. So did well armed insurgents or invaders. Nothing else did.
To manage the transformation, it was necessary to anticipate the possible ways that the transformational constitutional project could unfold in practice – the various authorities that might be involved, the cohesiveness of their actions, the possible interpretations of the text, and the probable obstacles.
No. This was wholly unnecessary. What mattered was whether the Government could kill Commies or Razakars and stamp out strikes in essential industries or mutinies of any type. What worked in Nehru's favor was the lethargy and incompetence of the Princes. Also, the Muslim threat had united the Hindus. Otherwise, India would have been Balkanized- i.e. lots of separate shitholes instead of one big shithole.
This required an administrative mindset – a calculation of mechanics, techniques and scenarios.
Which the ICS had. Nehru & Co. didn't.
It required comparative analysis of constitutional experiences in different countries, speculating on possible outcomes, specifying details of the administrative structure and apportionment of tasks; as well as working through multiple caveats, clarifications and exceptions in several provisions.
Not really. The big issues had been settled by default. No reserved seats for Muslim. A Unitary rather than Federal structure. Provision for easy amendment. No due process clause. In case there was any doubt- along came the First Amendment. Still, back then Nehru had to be careful not to trigger a mass resignation of Judges.
All this in order to produce one of the most detailed and lengthy constitutions in history.
Because the 1935 Act was the lengthiest law in British history only being surpassed in 1999.
It also explained the vast shadows of the Government of India Act – which had prompted Ambedkar’s comments. That Act – and the manual for an administrative machine that it had produced – was familiar to Congressmen from their experience in government, its strengths and weaknesses having been tested on Indian soil.
Indians were too shitty to make it work. That's what resulted in Partition. Once in power, Congress turned its back on the Mahacrackpot.
Sadnip believes that
popular political expressions were frequently directed against Indian elites who exploited their putative fellow travellers on the nationalist journey.
This wasn't true. Popular political expressions were directed at grabbing land from landlords, not paying taxes, and being allowed to murder your relatives or neighbors without having to pay a lot of money to a lawyer to get you acquitted.
As a result, the anticolonial struggle generated multiple visions of freedom
e.g. Khilafat vs Ram Rajya. But Gandhi & Co had brought both together by 1920-21. Then, Gandhi unilaterally surrendered because, it suddenly occurred to him, the Brits might slyly fuck off.
which the Congress could hope to harness, but never fully control.
But those popular movements collapsed on their own. What Nehru couldn't do was 'Mass Contact' with Muslims- perhaps because Hindu Congressmen weren't interested. But Jinnah showed the 'elite' could control Islamic passions.
Over the last decade of colonial rule, the Congress began to transform itself from a party of mass mobilisation to a party of government.
Not really. They were only in office for a couple of years and, most people agree, did a shitty job save in so far as their job was done for them by the ICS. The problem here is that the Civil Service had been Indianized- i.e., relatively speaking, had turned to shit. In other words, Nehru needed at least one or two capable people in his Cabinet- which is why he brought in people like Mathai, Deshmukh, TTK etc.
The corridors of the statehouses, rather than the streets, became the staging ground for the last act of elite anticolonial politics
The politics of the Thirties was anti-each-other not anti-colonial.
And from such corridors, the streets appeared treacherous.
The reverse was the case. The Premier of Bengal- an aristocratic barrister- called for the carnage which engulfed Calcutta's streets on 'Direct Action Day'.
The success of the mass mobilisation made a postcolonial government an inevitability,
But mass mobilisations had occurred in the early Twenties! What changed was Britain's greatly weakened military and economic position. The fact is, it couldn't have thrown back the Japanese but for massive American help.
while that same mobilisation generated unease in the minds of the governors in waiting.
Not really. Jinnah showed you could be as posh as fuck, eat bacon and drink whiskey and still return from London and be accepted as the leader of the pious Muslim masses of India. The Princes should have taken note and turned their wives into vote catching machines. One or two did so and still enjoy great power and wealth.
So, the Congress accepted a transfer of power in an orderly fashion under the immaculate legality of the British parliament, inheriting the formidable apparatus of the colonial state in pristine condition – with its bureaucrats, police, and army.
This cretin doesn't get that the British apparatus of power was split in two by Partition. Also, as almost all the Whites left, standards were bound to fall.
“Through a fortunate or unfortunate chance,
i.e. the Brits defeating the Japs and their puppet, Netaji Bose
it turned out that it was not through a bloody revolution that we have worked out our emancipation,” Congress president Pattabhi Sitaramayya said in the Constituent Assembly. There was no revolution in India. At least not yet. On that “not yet” hinged the entire project of postcolonial constitution-making.
Fuck off! The Commies wagged their tails and were swiftly dealt with. After that, they were sweet and nice.
In textbooks of constitutional theory, constitutions bring closure – the peaceful ever after following upheavals.
Nonsense! Constitutional theory is about how constitutions are interpreted by courts long after a transfer of power, revolutionary or otherwise.
They end revolutions.
No. What ends a revolution is the defeat or running away of an administration.
In India, there was no revolution to end. But there was one to be prevented.
By killing or incarcerating Commie nutjobs. This had nothing to do with the Constitution though it was part of the background to the First Amendment.
From where the constitution makers stood, this future “revolution” had two possible incarnations. It could take the shape of a violent uprising of the disaffected masses, fueled by inequality, exploitation, and unfulfilled aspirations for freedom, causing “insurrections and bloodshed”.
but these would collapse after some months of anarchy unless, of course, the Army went in and did extra-judicial killing on an industrial scale.
Alternatively, it could be a thoroughgoing transformation of the socio-economic conditions, carefully planned and managed.
None occurred. Careful planning and management of a budget of zero has a result that is zero.
In my book, I identify that reconfigured form as “transformational constitutionalism”.
It was useless. No fucking transformation occurred.
Transformational constitutionalism was a constitutional order whose orienting principle was planned social transformation.
But the Planning Commission was extra-Constitutional. This cunt is talking bollocks.
It sought to facilitate change, not constrain it.
As did the 1935 Act and other British legislation before that. The Brits had Parliamentary supremacy. So did India, though if, as happened in Pakistan, Nehru had become President and decided to sideline the Assembly, the Judges would have invented some 'doctrine of necessity' to make the thing halal.
A process of change that was deliberate, controlled, and conflict-free. Transformational and yet constitutional.
Because Constitutions have magic powers. Evil British Viceroys- like Kasturba Gandhi Marg- failed to abolish death at least as pertains my pussy cat. Fuck you Kasturba (aka Curzon)! Fuck you very much!
A full account of that undertaking therefore must depart from the idea of a constitution as an established normative template.
It must depart from sanity.
The word “constitution” is derived from the Latin word constituere – which means to make, to create, collectively. It is a verb, not just a noun. This is the meaning of “constitution” that we need to recover – as a creative project.
After that, we will be able to abolish death- at least for my darling pussy cat.
BR Ambedkar’s concluding speech has become the most quoted part of the assembly debates. “Political democracy cannot last unless there lies at the base of it social democracy”, he warned.
Political democracy is a real thing. Social Democracy is meaningless. The silly man meant 'Social Equality'.
“On the 26th of January 1950, we are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality.”
The fool hadn't noticed that in politics there is NO fucking equality. That's why I can't move into Number 10 and order the King to abolish death- at least in so far as my cat is concerned.
The main argument of my book follows this warning: The Constitution had to orient itself around social transformation.
No it doesn't. This cunt lives in America. What fucking 'social transformation' did the American constitution orient itself around?
Political equality would be meaningless without social equality.
No. Political equality means we all have just the one vote. Social equality means there is no upper or lower class. Political equality has never entailed by Social equality- which has never existed.
The constitution had to address the social condition not just because it must, but also because it should.
But it didn't address shit. Reservations for Dalits was based on Religion not Social class- which is why Dalit Muslims, Sikhs and Christians were excluded. Later, Dalit Sikhs and Buddhists were admitted.
As the full text of the speech makes it clear, this was not a “should” uttered with the confidence of a triumphant “father of the constitution”. It was uttered with a sense of foreboding, of doubt.
Ambedkar was a fool to resign and think he could get elected on the strength of his own verbosity.
Ambedkar’s place in Indian politics
is based on trying to suck up to the Dalits by pretending one of them was smart. But Ambedkar and Mandal were not smart. Jagjivan Ram was. Kharge is. But guys with Amrikan PhDs tend to be as stupid as shit.
made that doubt particularly resonant. He was a consistent critic of the Congress and a member of the most oppressed section of Indian society, who found himself in the position of the principal drafter of the constitution.
It helped that he hated Gandhi and could be relied upon to say, in a polite manner, what Indians were thinking- viz. Indians are shit. Without the Brits, the country would be unable to feed or defend itself. What they didn't know was that it would also sink into Dynasticism.
A man without access to either political or social power,
he had both thanks to the British. Since Churchill kept banging on about how beastly Hindooooos were to their untouchables, and because Mandal was Jinnah's Law Minister, Ambedkar had a brief importance. But, he lived in a fantasy world and when he got too big for his boots, was doomed to wander the political wilderness barefoot. Thus, the poor fellow had to turn to Religion and become a Boddhisattva.
he put his faith in the extraordinary opening of the constitution-making moment:
No. He knew Constitutions don't matter even if, as in the US, there is dual sovereignty. FDR had shown that the Bench could be packed and separation of powers could be nullified. Also, Ambedkar had no illusions about the American Revolution because he himself was classed as 'Black' when he studied in New York. Slaves and First Nations were not included in the American 'We, the People'. Moreover, Wilson, as POTUS, was chucking Blacks out of Federal Government at precisely the time Ambedkar was at Columbia.
a fleeting but decisive moment of liberation from everyday forms of hierarchy,
there was plenty of hierarchy in the Constituent Assembly. Also India had plenty of Princes whom you had to bow down to.
where well-drafted legal clauses could be used as weapons against long-entrenched inequities.
No. That is why the Constitution had to be amended so many times. It wasn't till the 26th amendment in 1971 that Privy Purses were abolished.
In the “essentially undemocratic soil” of India with its vast imbalances of power, the law was the best hope of the revolutionaries.
Fuck off! Killing people can bring about a revolution. The law, by definition, can't. What this cretin is saying is 'not being a fucking revolutionary was the best hope for revolutionaries'. This is because the Government could slaughter revolutionaries with vim and vigor.
This faith in the project of legalizing the revolution was of the most poignant kind because Ambedkar was the voice of a group that had so little to be hopeful of from the law and so little to lose from a revolution.
He was Hindu and thus was fine. It was his pal, J.N Mandal, who had to run the fuck away from Pakistan- where he had been Law Minister. Ambedkar wasn't a complete fool. He knew a Revolution would put Dalits at the mercy of 'Backward Castes' who, gaining land, would want a cowed captive labor force so they could concentrate on growing out
His was therefore the doubt of someone who sincerely wanted to hold on to both the ends of the legalizing revolution project – the legal and the revolutionary.
His was the job of doing boring shit in return for a Government pay-check. Like Mandal, he was a 'cosmetic hire'.
His doubt has proven to be mostly correct.
But he was proven to be as stupid as shit. He converted to Buddhism- which exported untouchability as far as Japan. Bali has Brahmins but no Dalits. Japan has Dalits but no Brahmins.
75 years hence, only the former remains.
Currently, it appears that a Student agitation can cause a 'Revolution' in South Asia, such that Reservations are removed and the Chief Justice has to resign.
Having long abandoned the project of developmental transformation,
That project was hot air disguising rent extraction from first to last.
we have learnt to see the constitution mostly as a set of legal norms.
Only if we studied stupid shite at Collidge and then had to stay on to teach there because we were as stupid as shit.
Lawyers and judges are its custodians, and its discussions are limited to courtrooms.
Lawyers get paid a lot of money to tell stupid lies. This dude- not so much.
Its biography is written as case laws.
Which, in a poor country, have no or very limited effect. Don't forget, court judgments are costly to enforce. In any case, extra judicial killing is what keeps the country together.
While outside the “essential undemocratic soil” of India remained more or less untitled.
Because Indians continued to be shit- unless they emigrated.
In the last few years, we have witnessed the beginning of another kind of constitutional conversation – this one taking place in rallies and parliament, speeches and manifestos.
Modi had extended Reservations for SC/ST but the opposition convinced a lot of Dalits that Modi planned to get rid of Reservations. Modi's party paid the price for complacency and poor messaging.
This is constitution understood not as a set of abstract legal norms, but as a document shaped by and speaking to the political realities of the moment.
It is as shit as Indian reality- that's true enough.
A political rather than legal text.
Which the Bench claims the exclusive right to interpret- i.e. to do stupid shit.
This nascent form of constitutional politics has the potential to revive the lofty promise of a transformational constitutional project.
Why not revive the lofty promise to abolish death- at least for my pussy cat?
To do that, however, it cannot entirely be a defensive endeavour, understandable as it is in the present context. Just the invocation of the principles of the rule of law will not save us.
from getting raped or robbed. Sad.
As Ambedkar understood, for the constitution and democracy to survive, one had to address the deep inequities of the Indian social order.
Democracy didn't survive. Dynastic rule prevailed though assassination tempered autocracy.
The transformation was not and is not a benevolent wish. It was, and remains, the necessary condition for a thriving constitutional democracy in India.
things which may happen in the future can't be necessary conditions for things which are happening now. Sadnip is as thick as shit.
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