Book review: Rohit De, A People's Constitution
Rohit De - A People's Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic
Reviewed by Sunita Kale
Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=54127
Reviewed by Sunita Kale
Rohit De’s A
People’s Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic offers
a creative examination of the first two decades in the life of India’s
constitutional order. A corrective to the argument that this order exists at
two removes from the lives of ordinary Indians, De instead shows that although
the document was drafted and ratified by a thin layer of political elites, it
was through the engagement and interaction of ordinary Indians with the
Constitution that its purpose and power was made manifest.
The introductory
chapter lays out the stakes of De’s project. De suggests that over time, by
invoking the Constitution, “citizen action drove politics into the courts” (p.
4). This tendency toward judicialization of conflict was already present in the
colonial period but De suggests it became even more pronounced after the new
constitutional order came into effect. In telling the story of India’s
Constitution from the vantage of ordinary citizens, De marks a middle ground
between two divergent narratives, one triumphant and the other cynical.
The
former stories emphasize the Constitution’s heroic authors and their radical
impulses whereas the latter gesture to the vast gap between the rhetoric of
radicalism and the reality that so many parts of the text were taken unamended
from colonial law, and served to uphold the interests and integrity of the
state and elite actors above those of ordinary citizens. De suggests that a
careful reading of the judicial record shows that this gap is chimerical;
ordinary citizens did in fact believe the Constitution to be an important repository
of rights upon which they could stake claims, and acted on this belief.
The
mechanism of engagement was the constitutional provision that allowed citizens
to bring complaints about the state’s violation of fundamental rights, and
enjoined the courts to provide remedies in the form of writs against the state.
And, significantly, it was through such claim-making that the “the Indian
Constitution profoundly transformed everyday life in the Indian republic” (p.
9).. read more:http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=54127
Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=54127
