Why was there an air of uncertainty during the drafting of Indian constitution
Answers
Dr. B.R. Ambedkar
On 29 August, 1947, the Constituent Assembly set up a Drafting Committee under the Chairmanship of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar to prepare a Draft Constitution for India.
Answer:
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Explanation:
Sixty-nine years ago, the adoption of the Indian Constitution was regarded, variously, as a “reckless” political experiment, a cause for celebration amid uncertainty, as India set out to be the world’s “largest democracy”, and of triumph amid tragedy, as it became a republic during the bloodbath of Partition. The first Constitution of a Commonwealth country to be drafted entirely by its own nationals, the Indian Constitution was, and remains, the longest written constitution in the world. The length of the Constitution is a reflection of the magnitude of problems facing the newly independent nation, including its very integration as a nation state; the need to reassure minorities following Partition; and the need to build a new social and economic order that would lift millions out of poverty, even as it sought to eliminate pervasive social and religious discrimination.
Some of these problems and uncertainties continue to resonate today. But as India enters the 70th year of the Republic, it has the new moniker of being the world’s largest “stable” democracy, a feat unique to India in the post colonial world. The resilience of the Constitution is a testament to the founders’ foresight in imbuing its text with the spirit of diversity amid unity. The Indian Constitution is not one constitution, but many. Though Article 370, for the state of Jammu and Kashmir, is the most well known exception to the Constitution’s general provisions, the entirety of part XXI of the Constitution contains differentiated provisions for the states of Assam, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram, Sikkim, and Arunachal Pradesh. Part X of the Constitution creates a differentiated legal framework for “Scheduled Areas” within 14 states of India, that constitute 13% of India’s geographical area, including the entire state of Meghalaya, and more than half the states of Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Tripura.
The Constitution is also resilient because it was wedded to the principle of incrementalism. The founders were deeply conscious that they were guaranteeing fundamental rights to life, liberty, equality, and property, to all citizens, in a society deeply divided on the basis of religion, caste, and gender. Therefore, in the chapters on Fundamental Rights and Directive Principles of State Policy, they provided pointers, not answers, for resolving tensions that would inevitably arise between the interests of the individual v. the collective.
Resolution of tensions between “individual property” and “state’s power to take away property” for the “collective good of economic development and social redistribution”, resulted in the abolition of the fundamental right to property in 1978. Tensions with respect to “individual women’s rights to equality” v “collective religious diktats” have been playing out, with intermittent resolution, for many decades, for instance, in the case of Muslim women’s rights to divorce and maintenance, from the Shah Bano case in the 1980s to the current bill criminalising triple talaq, and Hindu women’s rights to inheritance of joint family property from the 1950s to equal religious right to worship in the context of the Sabarimala case today.
Despite our Constitution’s resilience, we can never take its continued existence and the stability of India’s democracy for granted. In fact, the greatest threats to the Constitution come because we expect both too much, and too little, from our Constitution. The recent constitutional amendment on “poor upper caste reservations”, which has turned the concept of reservation based affirmative action on its head, is an example of how public disaffection with the state’s redistributive failures is sought to be temporarily assuaged through recourse to the Constitution. The constitutional amendment, while it exists (there are strong reasons to believe that it is unconstitutional), will momentarily camouflage the ineptitude and decay of our public institutions, and the failure of our “economic development” narrative, but will not resolve the crisis that threatens the social and economic, and, therefore, the political stability of the nation.