Year: 2025
Type: peer-review
Abstract: This essay responds to the critical scrutiny I have received from Roux, Srikantan and Tundawala in their reviews of my book India's Communal Constitution. 1 Sharply spotlighting key issues and questions that arise from my efforts to identify a "communal tendency" in Indian constitutional imagination, they offer me the opportunity to revisit and reflect on the central themes of my book for which I am extremely grateful.To start, it is useful to draw on Srikantan and Roux to emphasise that my book is organised to make apparent the landscape of conceptual themes and that have been put to use in Indian constitutional practice to inflect the identity of the Indian people in communal or ethno-national terms. 2 To quote Roux to clarify this part of my argument, "as pure text, the Communal Constitution is an almost non-existent document, with no single provision pointing conclusively to that conception of national identity."3 This quote is important to note as the book has also mentioned on many occasions that the dominant orientation of the constitutional text was to establish something akin to a liberal constitutional identity where the people were to be understood as a community of free and equal citizens.Against that broadly liberal background, the case for the Communal Constitution and its foregrounding of religious identity was always going to be a counterintuitive form of characterising Indian constitutional imagination.Even so, it is against this liberal background that I have tried to demonstrate a colonially inspired religious or communal identification of the people in the Indian Constitution's interpretation and practice of religious freedom, personal law, minority rights and caste identification.The characterisation of Indian constitutionalism as displaying a communal tendency is an important concern of all three essays.For Tundawala, the very presentation of the Communal Constitution as a pathological expression of the constituent power of the people was unconvincing.4 As he argues, the Indian Constitution embodied the best of the democratic and revolutionary traditions of the modern world where liberalism was to be supplemented if not supplanted by a people giving themselves a constitution.That is, the people in the Indian Constitution were best understood not merely as the "symbolic unity of free and equal citizens […] but […] also in reality a diverse plurality of groups and
Source: Verfassung in Recht und Übersee
Author: Mathew John
Institution: BML Munjal University
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4415468703
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