The EconomistDecember 14th 2019 711R
ajmohan gandhiwas a teenager when
newly independent India adopted its
constitution at the end of 1949. “It was a sa-
cred thing, our common religion,” he says
on the document’s 70th anniversary. Now a
historian and based in Illinois, he sips
milky chai as he recalls how the republic’s
secular-minded founders sought to forge a
modern, democratic country.
British imperialists had ruled India by
dividing their subjects into groups, notably
of Hindus and Muslims. They let only a
tiny, moneyed elite take part in politics.
The drafters of the constitution wanted
radical change. Its 395 provisions ended up
decreeing equal rights for all individuals.
All adults, some 160m men and women,
could vote; untouchability was abolished;
rights to private property, free speech and
belief (among others) were enshrined. The
courts were to be independent.
Many had doubts about this project.
Could a giant democracy with so many di-
verse and poor people really hold together?
Most of its voters were illiterate. Trauma
lingered from the bloody partition of Mus-
lim-majority Pakistan in 1947. India’s in-
corporation of its princely states had alsobeen painful. Moreover, none of those
vaunted liberal ideas was rooted in tradi-
tional society. Bhimrao Ambedkar, the
chief drafter of the constitution, said
bluntly that he despised life in the vil-
lages—where most people lived—as a “sink
of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-
mindedness and communalism”.
The biggest threat to the new order was
posed by extremists who claimed to speak
for the Hindu majority (then some 85% of
India’s population, now 80%). The likes of
Nathuram Godse, a zealot who shot dead
Mr Gandhi’s grandfather, Mohandas
Gandhi, called the republic’s leaders sell-
outs, soft on Pakistan and needlessly con-cerned with the interests of non-Hindus.
“India must be a Hindu land, reserved for
Hindus,” wrote Vinayak Savarkar, who
coined the term “Hindutva” for the politics
of promoting Hindu interests above all.
Such figures hated the constitution’s
special treatment of Muslim-majority
Kashmir, which was given semi-autono-
my. Extreme Hindu groups, notably the
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (rss), want-
ed nothing secular in the document. There
were “very strong cries for a Hindu state”,
Mr Gandhi remembers. “That Indian lead-
ers said ‘No, it will be a secular state’—it
was a wonderful thing,” he says with a
smile. Jawaharlal Nehru, the prime minis-
ter, rejected religious rivalry as “a medieval
conception which has no place in the mod-
ern world”.
Seventy years on, how healthy is India’s
liberal order? In his forthcoming, tightly
argued book, “India’s Founding Moment”,
Madhav Khosla captures the pressures on
those who wrote the constitution, many of
which persist today. He marvels at the “in-
explicable survival” of constitutional de-
mocracy, while worrying about its future in
India and beyond.
Mr Khosla thinks the constitution’s en-
durance derived from the popular legiti-
macy earned by those universal rights, and
from widespread trust in the rule of law. In
his book on constitutions around the
world, Bruce Ackerman says it helped
greatly that strong, charismatic Indian
leaders showed restraint by respecting the
law themselves. Crucially, Nehru deferred
to the authority of the courts and the con-Democracy in IndiaUnite and rule
On the 70th anniversary of its constitution, India’s liberal democratic
order is under threatIndia’s Founding Moment.By Madhav
Khosla. To be published in February by
Harvard University Press; 240 pages; $45
and £36.95
Revolutionary Constitutions.By Bruce
Ackerman. Belknap Press; 472 pages; $35
and £28.95
I Am the People. By Partha Chatterjee.
Columbia University Press; 208 pages; $25
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