Democratic Constitutionalism in India and the Blandishments of Grand Narratives

Mathew John

Professor at School of Law, BML Munjal University in Delhi, India.

This timely and engaging essay by Theunis Roux sweeps across the democratic constitutionalist project as it is under threat of running aground in India and South Africa with echoes for other countries across the world. His axis of analysis is held together by two grand narratives articulating national constitutional self-identity in these countries – the liberal progressivist narrative (LPN), and the cultural grand narrative (CGN). These conceptualisations of national and constitutional self-identity define the poles along which Roux contours the challenge of forging the political and institutional conditions for democratic constitutionalism in these countries.

Framed in this manner, the essay seems to suggest that the institutional success of the hitherto dominant liberal constitutional project (broadly the LPN) hinges on its ability to draw on and bring itself into dialogue with its principal antagonists – cultural nationalists (broadly the CGN). Accordingly, the essay details both the LPN and CGN, brings them into an imagined dialogue, and pulls them together to further a democratic vision for constitutionalism in the global South. As these two narratives are brought into conversation, a key threat that is evaluated in some depth is the colonially inflected political imagination inherited in India and South Africa and its suitability for forging constitutionalism in the global South. As the essay is organised, CGN prosecutes the charge of colonially inflected (unsuitable) choices in the making of these Constitutions, and LPN – which was broadly adopted as part of the dominant institutional firmament – finds itself fending off the charge of being complicit in carrying on colonial government in a new garb through the independence Constitutions of India and South Africa.

Negotiating the demand for decolonising constitutional imagination and practice is therefore a key concern of this essay. Consequently, my comment is also organised around the essay’s identification of the problem of colonisation and its afterlives. In particular, I focus on the social and political formations associated with the CGN that are understood as embodying the case for decolonisation. The ideological and institutional reality of colonialism, as well appreciated by the essay, was a framing condition for law and politics for all parties across India and South Africa. Therefore, all political and constitutional positions that took shape in opposition to colonialism were perforce shaped by the institutional and intellectual currents of colonial society. However, in what manner could it be argued by any actor in a colonial setting that they and their political imagination best embodies and articulates the case for decolonisation? By extension how would it be possible to determine the most appropriate constitutional architecture for the post-colonial condition?

I try to answer these questions with the example of India. Thus, exploring this problem through the case of India, I feel that Roux misidentifies the problem posed by colonialism by taking arguments advanced by the followers of Hindutva at face value to embody the case for decolonising the imagination and practice of modern constitutionalism. But why must one look beyond and second guess the arguments advanced by a set of political actors who explicitly criticise the colonial character of the Indian political imagination and argue for drawing on native India political idioms? The answer lies in the history of colonial politics in India within whose folds Hindutva was asserted as rightfully representing Indian identity.

Historically, the Indian state was fashioned and justified by the colonial government through the logic of tutoring or mentoring India and Indians to learn to articulate their national self-identity as a people, which the British colonial state found was impeded by India’s numerous social divisions.  Against this backdrop it is possible to view both the LPN and the CGN as different responses to the colonial charge regarding the deficiency of Indians as peoples divided by religion, caste, tribe, region, race, and so on. In opposition to this colonial charge, what eventually came to be the LPN maps onto the position articulated by their liberal nationalist forebears that Indians could constitute themselves into a unified sovereign polity of individual citizens. Similarly, the CGN maps on to a pitch for identity, asserting that Indians could and ought to fashion sovereign political unity along the lines of a culturally inflected nationalism. Arguably the most influential form of cultural nationalist assertion has been the religio-civilisational assertion of India as a land formed and divided by its main religious identities – Hindu and Muslim. In contemporary India the followers of Hindutva politics who argue that India ought to be more closely identified with what they called Hindu identity form the heart of cultural nationalism that Roux takes to embody the CGN position. However, it is important to note that both the LPN and the CGN are organised as entirely modern/European/colonial responses to the colonial challenge to develop their identity as a people. Both narratives deny the colonial charge that a sense of being a people is underdeveloped or absent in India, and offer themselves as answers (in the modern/European mode) to the question of who/where/when were the Indian people?

The LPN and the CGN were of course both opposed to the colonial state as it denied the Indian people legal and political agency, and in turn they could each be distinguished from the other (as Roux does in the essay). However, they are nonetheless positions derived from the push of colonial/modern/western influences as they goaded Indians to develop a sense of constitutional self-identity. Both are minimally anti-colonial, but the proponents of neither of them would be willing to give up on their respective (modern/colonially shaped) ideas of a sovereign people which was admittedly still in the making across much of the first half (and perhaps more) of the twentieth century. Entering this debate on Indian self-identity, Gandhi completely denied the colonial assertion that Indians lacked identity as a people and refused the demand that Indians develop a sense of political unity understood through the frames of liberal individualism, cultural nationalism, federalism and so on. In his exhortation to India, the inhabitants of the subcontinent only needed to double down by rediscovering and refining the everyday and plural practices that had defined them over millennia.

Gandhi was uninterested in the development of the constitutional imagination that colonialism introduced to India. On the contrary it could be said that he spurred the most thoroughgoing recent attempt to revitalise Indian traditions that emphasised individual self-making sustainable forms of engagement with the natural world as also forms of engaging with each other as multiple and plural communities. Pulled together in his manifesto, the Hind Swaraj, these ideas are elaborated in greater detail as the basis for Indian freedom from the oppressive structures of colonial rule which impeded India’s civilisational approach to human freedom. If Roux was to examine a full-throated effort at decolonising Indian political and constitutional imagination, I would imagine that it could not evade engagement with the legacy of the likes of Gandhi in contemporary India.

Gandhian political argument, however, remains on the fringes of Roux’s essay. Nonetheless, the question that Roux poses to me is the work that ‘decolonisation’ is doing in his essay. Driven by a concern for southern constitutionalism where the existing verities defined by the hegemony of liberalism are being challenged by nationalisms that are articulated in the language of cultural identity, the problem of decolonisation per se might be a matter of secondary concern. However, since the essay draws quite significantly on the challenge posed by the call to decolonisation, I wonder what it would mean to explore what a more full-bodied examination of arguments for decolonisation would do for the now failing experiments with constitutionalism in the global south.

Mathew John is a Professor at School of Law, BML Munjal University in Delhi, India.

This post is part of a symposium, guest edited by Anmol Jain, responding to Theunis Roux’s article ‘Grand Narratives of Transition and the Quest for Democratic Constitutionalism in India and South Africa’

Suggested Citation: Mathew John, ‘Democratic Constitutionalism and the Blandishments of Grand Narratives’ IACL-AIDC Blog (XXX) Democratic Constitutionalism in India and the Blandishments of Grand Narratives — IACL-IADC Blog