Tag: democracy

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Issue 18

What Constitutes a Constitution?

“India requires a new constitution…I firmly believe that so many nations have rewritten their Constitutions whenever they felt it necessary. They have got new Constitutions. Now, there is a need in this country to pursue a new Constitution of India. Our slogan will be ‘Naya Soch, Nayi Disha, Naya Samvidhan (new thinking, new direction, and new Constitution).’” A mere week after India’s 72nd anniversary of adopting the Constitution, this proclamation by Telangana Chief Minister, K. Chandrashekhar Rao seems both provocative and confusing. KCR buttresses his claim by stating that “people’s expectations haven’t been met” in the past 75 years, which invalidates the utility of the present constitution. But how would a new constitution help in meeting those expectations? Is it even the point of a constitution to meet “people’s expectations?” Further, what is the relationship between a constitution and political outcomes?

The comments seem slightly more understandable in the context of KCR’s grievance against the centre, as it constantly overlooks and overrides the constitutional powers mandated to state governments. Yet, that grievance catapults to a desire for “newness” as a sort of panacea: a new constitution will solve everything that plagues the country, much like a project of remodelling Lutyens’ Delhi becomes the key to national rejuvenation. Replicating both the current dispensation’s logic of needlessly introducing novelty and its penchant for alliterative sloganeering, KCR seems to be speaking in the language of the very central government he seeks to oppose.

KCR’s call-to-arms elicited condemnation from across the political arena. Curiously, leading the charge is BJP MP from Telangana, Bandi Sanjay Kumar. In a series of tweets criticising the Chief Minister’s “abusive” attitude towards the Prime Minister and the constitution, Kumar ends with: “BJP abides by Dr. B.R Ambedkar’s Constitution and will never allow it to become vulnerable to the machinations of megalomaniacs like KCR.” One might concede sincerity to Kumar’s opposition to “megalomaniacs like KCR;” but leaving the Constitution vulnerable to the machinations of other kinds of megalomaniacs must certainly be fair game for Kumar.

What with the overt violations of legal procedure and convention, the authoritarian capture of otherwise autonomous institutions, like the Election Commission, military, and even the judiciary, along with a proliferation of hate-speech and atrocities against religious minorities and oppressed groups across the country over the past seven years. It is difficult to believe, then, that the BJP abides, in any measure, by “Dr. B.R Ambedkar’s Constitution,” as it unabashedly flouts the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity installed within our Preamble. Instead, Kumar’s comments stem not from a commitment to constitutional morality, but a treatment of the constitution as a sacred relic rather than a readable document, whose spirit might founder some of the foundational assumptions behind Kumar’s own political ideology.

Both KCR and Kumar, then, seem to leave us with two models of thinking about the constitution: it is either treated as a means to an end—the achievement of particular political and economic outcomes that the current document has failed to ensure—or defended as an object of almost religious reverence, ironically failing to take its actual text seriously. Either a tool, or a sacrament. But are there other ways of thinking about the constitution, other forms of envisioning our relationship to it as citizens? To hark back to an earlier set of questions, what is the purpose of a constitution? Can we ‘defend’ the constitution without worshipping it or resisting suggestions of change?

Without necessarily answering these questions in any direct manner, I’d like to turn attention to a phrase that I just used: constitutional morality. This seemingly self-explanatory term—a moral commitment to the constitution, or the morality enshrined within it—appears as an object of critical inquiry in various discourses of constitutionality. The most relevant instance of the phrase comes from Dr. B.R. Ambedkar’s citation of the classicist George Grote, in his speech ‘The Draft Constitution,’ delivered on 4 November 1948: “By constitutional morality, Grote meant… a paramount reverence for the forms of the constitution, enforcing obedience to authority and acting under and within these forms…”

It is difficult to do justice to the entire complex of ideas that this abbreviated sentence presents, but what is particularly interesting is the repeated use of the term ‘form.’ For Grote, reverence is enacted not simply to the constitution but its forms. However bitterly opposed different political factions may be, they must share a belief in the sacredness of the form of the constitution. This belief becomes constitutional morality itself.

It is the form of the constitution, then, and not just the sum of laws contained within it—it’s content—that should gain prominence in our evaluation of it. The form of the constitution doesn’t merely refer to the framing of a legal document; it bleeds into a socio-political and intellectual space, and the conditions on which the functioning of that space is premised. Thus, we might disagree about the validity of certain laws—the current debates on marital rape, or the infamous section-377, repealed shamefully recently, bear testament to the existence of reprehensible legal statutes—or be disillusioned by the dissonance between the vision of the constitution and the lack of its actualisation. But to truly respect the constitution is not to defer to a specific set of rules or axioms; it is to consider seriously the process of encountering difference, listening to dissenting voices, and respecting the dignity of each individual that undergirds its very composition: what forms a constitution.
Yet, as we collectively acquiesce to a project of annihilating difference, where democracy is preserved merely as a catalyst for demagoguery, we are moving further away from this vision of constitutional morality, a vision that Pratap Bhanu Mehta expands upon in his lecture titled ‘What is constitutional morality?’: “In the face of difference, the only point of unanimity that one can seek is over an appropriately designed adjudicative process…What the parties have to agree to, as Ambedkar recognizes over and over, is an allegiance to a constitutional form, not an allegiance to a particular substance.” It is precisely this ‘adjudicative process’ whose downfall we witness today in the relentless erosion of institutional authority. Far more dangerous, however, is the ruling dispensation’s singular allegiance to its own ideological substance that threatens to deform the constitution to its very core.

Adit Shankar is a first-year masters student of English at Ashoka University. His writing has previously appeared in Scroll, and he is interested in the politics and literature of South Asia.

We publish all articles under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noderivatives license. This means any news organisation, blog, website, newspaper or newsletter can republish our pieces for free, provided they attribute the original source (OpenAxis).

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Issue 18

Morphing a Monument

On 21st January 2022, the Amar Jawan Jyoti, the flame that had been burning at the India Gate for the past fifty years, was ‘merged’ with the flame at the National War Memorial. The Jyoti had been established in 1972 by the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, to commemorate the soldiers who had lost their lives in the 1971 Indo-Pak War. The decision was met with mixed reactions from the public. 

Among those who lauded the Central Government, there seemed to be a broad consensus about the legitimacy of such an action — that the government had carried out a long overdue ritual. After the government’s announcement, a barrage of social-media users felt the need to incessantly emphasise the semantic difference between “merging” the flame and “extinguishing” it. If the flames had indeed been ‘merged’, then there would have been two flames burning in the capital right now. However, the government asserts that this is not feasible as “maintenance of two flames would have been difficult.” One might argue that a new parliament building worth Rs 13,000 crore might require much more maintenance than a single additional flame. But logic seems incongruous with the current political environment.

Another popular justification for this action seems to stem from the fact that the India Gate is a colonial monument. “It may have been intended as a tribute to hundreds of India’s bravest who fought for the British, but it is also a monument to British immorality,” noted prime time television journalist, Rahul Shivshankar in an article for The Times Of India. The ghost of colonial injustices, looming over the India Gate, has suddenly become so overpowering that a monument dedicated to those who bore the brunt of those very injustices has lost its significance. This discomfort with our colonial past is not just flawed, but also selective; colonial DNA flows through the veins of every single government institution of present-day India, the most glaring example of all being the Indian Military. The Beating Retreat is definitely not an ‘inherently Indian’ concept, yet it is a tradition we have grown to associate with the Indian Republic.

However, the “merger” of the flames was also criticised in equal measure. A wide section of critics, including army veterans and opposition party members, lamented the loss of an iconic symbol. Some also noted that the eternal flame is no longer eternal, suggesting that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government is putting the immortality of age-old conventions at stake here. The problem with such a discourse lies with how heavily rooted in nostalgia it is, thereby implying that change is the crime of which the BJP is guilty. It also gives way to other misplaced criticisms. An example of this would be a tweet by Rashtriya Janata Dal MP Manoj Kumar Jha, who voiced a sentiment echoed by multiple other critics. “It is understandable that the present regime may not have a sense of attachment or belonging with the ‘glories of the past’…” he tweeted. This is not quite the case. In fact, the BJP is deeply invested in the past. It is for this reason that their ideological machinery paints an elaborate picture of important historical events, which increases the significance of Hindutva icons, like Vir Savarkar. Further, the newly established hologram of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose at Rajpath shows how the BJP can effortlessly weave someone like Bose into the fabric of Hindutva. Renowned historian Rama Chandra Guha, during a conversation with The Indian Express, observed, “ [Bose] detested the Hindu Mahasabha and would have detested the RSS.”  While this prediction may or may not be true, what is truly petrifying is that it doesn’t really matter. The BJP’s powers of hypnosis are so strong that its supporters blindly buy its lies, without feeling the need to question its foundations. On top of this, rooting the criticism of the government’s recent ideologically-driven exercise in nostalgia only trivialises the magnitude of the BJP’s shrewd political machinations. 

The displacement of the Amar Jawan Jyoti and the inauguration of Netaji’s Hologram, among other events of “Aazadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav,” don’t merely affect our memory of the past, but also colour our idea of the present with saffron hues. It makes us believe that under the current regime, India is transitioning into a new epoch. Moreover, by carrying out such “historic events,” the BJP claims that it is doing what the Congress couldn’t do in over seventy years: settling the scores of history by reviving past heroes. But in turn, they successfully project Narendra Modi and his deputies as the ‘real’ heroes. 

Ujjwala Shankar is a first-year undergraduate student at Ashoka University. She likes to write about Politics, Economics, and Literature. In her free time, she loves watching films and hopes to become a film critic someday.

We publish all articles under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noderivatives license. This means any news organisation, blog, website, newspaper or newsletter can republish our pieces for free, provided they attribute the original source (OpenAxis).

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Issue 15

A Litigating Life: Meet the Indian environmental lawyer who won the Alternative Nobel 2021

‘Between January and June 2021, the Standing Committee of National Board for Wildlife considered a total of 62 proposals in four meetings, out of which 29 proposals were for diversion within protected areas.’ This is from a vigilant status report published by LIFE (Legal Initiative for Forest and Environment), an Indian environment law non-profit. Timely status reports and policy briefs offering accessible legal analysis on the workings of national environmental institutions is a part of their initiative. Winning a landmark case against the British mining company Vedanta in Odisha, the Supreme Court of India reiterated that consent of the local community is key, LIFE has also been instrumental in the setting up of the National Green Tribunal in India. In September 2021, LIFE was awarded the Right Livelihood Prize ‘for innovative legal work empowering communities to protect their resources in the pursuit of environmental democracy in India.’ Meera Anand speaks to Ritwick Dutta, one of the two founding environmental lawyers of LIFE, on a 15-year journey, in providing judicial access to Indians at the climate change frontlines.

Part of Issue 15 of Open Axis, which focuses on interviews with path-breaking Indians responding to climate change challenges.

Video: 15 min

Meera Anand is a third year undergraduate student from Ashoka University. She is currently pursuing Economics as a major and Media Studies as a minor.

We publish all articles under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noderivatives license. This means any news organisation, blog, website, newspaper or newsletter can republish our pieces for free, provided they attribute the original source (OpenAxis).

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Issue 7

The Violence We Inherit

Picture Courtesy: Danish Siddiqui, Reuters

This year, the morning of 26th January held two instead of just one Republic Day parade. At Rajpath, celebrations for the 72nd year of the adoption of the Indian Constitution took place, whereas, in another part of Delhi, the farmers were exercising their right promised by this prestigious document, to highlight their demand to revoke the three controversial farm bills through a tractor rally. While at one end, the sound of the 21-Gun salute echoed in the air, in another part, chants of ‘kisaan kanoon wapas lo’ and clashes between the police and farmers were observed. 

Soon, videos surfaced on social media platforms of farmers driving tractors recklessly, bringing down barricades as policemen scrambled out of their way. Instances of police indulging in lathi-charge and tear-gas at protestors were also recorded. Events escalated to a level where certain protestors derailed from their march to hang the Nishaan Sahib, a saffron flag of great relevance to Sikh religion, at the Red Fort. The aftermath resulted in over 80 police personnel injured. 

In the past, having been known as the land of satyagraha, we have developed a certain identity rooted in non-violence. Does this notion influence the different ways we view violence in a protest today? While violence has been excused in certain contexts, it has been condemned in others. Moreover, there is a culture of blaming the violence on a ‘foreigner’ as a means to separate oneself from the narrative as it hinders the ‘non-violent’ reputation of India.  

With regards to R-Day, various conflicting views have surfaced regarding who holds the baton of responsibility for instigating the derailment of events. While Delhi Police Commissioner, SN Srivastava claims that the farmers were responsible for inciting violence and should be held accountable for their condemnable actions, various farmer leaders have explicitly separated themselves from those who chose to deviate. In an interview with the Hindu, Balbir Singh Rajewal, the president of the Bhartiya Kisan Union claimed that “it was a historic parade by lakhs of farmers with over 2 lakh tractors and 99.9% of the farmers stayed peaceful”. Along with this, certain farmer union leaders, as well as the opposition, have been propagating the view that the farmers were not responsible for the mayhem, and violence was instead enforced by individuals who were ‘foreign’ to the community and aimed at wanting to defame the peaceful farmer protests.

As simply consumers of news content, judgement about ‘who is responsible’ cannot be passed without proper investigation. However, it is interesting to note the emergence of different narratives surrounding the violence witnessed on R-Day. Certain sections that support the farmers argue that the violence showcased was ‘minimal’ and justified, considering that the government was choosing to ignore their citizens’ demands. Some even claim that it was anyone but the farmer responsible for the upheaval. However, those who do not believe in the farmers’ cause broadly argue that engaging in violence is condemnable and therefore warrants severe repercussions.

This manner of justifying violence in certain instances, and condemning it in others is not new to Indian culture. Ancient Indian epics like the Mahabharata have justified use of violence, where dharma (duty) to the caste system supersedes the value of kinship bonds. Romila Thapar, in her paper ‘War in Mahabharata’, highlights the moral-ethical dilemma that surrounded the conversation between Arjuna and Krishna, where the latter encouraged the former to kill his maternal uncle as he was an ally of the Kauravas. So, social obligations towards one’s caste became a valid explanation for killing a kinsman. Despite the description of “arrows tearing apart chests of warriors and free flow of blood creating a pandemonium”, the epic is still passed on in the form of tales to future generations, with gruesome violence deemed acceptable in the name of acquiring a kingdom and protecting its people. While the aim may be universal peace, it is reached through violent means.

Furthermore, ancient India has often been deemed as ‘peaceful’ and the reign of terror and violence has often been blamed on the ‘foreigner’ or ‘intruder’, like the Mughals and the British. This association of non-violence with ancient India exists  because we predominantly identify ancient India with Ashoka, the great emperor of the Mauryan dynasty who chose the path of non-violence and Buddhism after witnessing the repercussions of the Kalinga war. However, historian and author of ‘Political Violence in Ancient India’, Upinder Singh, in an interview with theWire, highlights how even “Jain and Buddhism texts use the vocabulary and imagery of war. Mahavira is a jina (victor); the Buddha fights a battle against the god Mara before attaining enlightenment while sitting under the Bodhi tree.” Historian DN Jha, in his book ‘Against the Grain’ also challenges this rhetoric of ancient India being devoid of any religious violence. Jha traces the Buddhist Sanskrit work, Divyavadana that describes Pushyamitra Shunga, a Hindu ruler and founder of the Shunga dynasty in 185 BCE, as the “great persecutor of Buddhists”. Jha claims that the ruler was responsible for the vandalising of the Sanchi Stupa and burning of the Ghositaram monastery in Kaushami that killed Buddhist monks. 

While these are just a few of the various instances of violence in India’s past, they have either not been emphasised enough or have been consciously ignored. The question to raise then is, when is violence excused and when is it not? 

The glorification of non-violence can be credited to satyagraha for freedom from British colonialism in modern Indian history. As Indians, we identify as the land of ahimsa and, therefore, choose to ignore the other side of the story. In fact, school history textbooks, sidelined those who engaged in violence for the freedom struggle and labelled them as ‘radicals’. However, movements like the 1857 revolt, showcased extreme violence that shook the stability of the East India Company within the country. The violence, while aimed towards a ‘foreigner’ was instigated and chosen by us as a path to rebel. If it weren’t for the widespread killing and burning of bungalows as well as chants of “maro firangi ko” (kill the white man) that filled the streets, would the British have left when they did?

Coming back to the opinions concerning the farmers’ protests—it can be observed that both the views justifying the violence and the ones condemning it and blaming it on an ‘intruder’, are views that are not new to Indian history. These biases can be observed in the ways we judge violence in current times.

Harshita Bedi is a student at Ashoka University pursuing her Psychology major. In her free time, you would find Harshita catching up on her sleep.

We publish all articles under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noderivatives license. This means any news organisation, blog, website, newspaper or newsletter can republish our pieces for free, provided they attribute the original source (OpenAxis).

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Issue 7

Museums of Democracy: How the Central Vista Project highlights the Importance of Curating History

This is primarily because any history we read, hear, or watch, is refracted, it is shaped by the person or thought process that is engaged in the exercise of compiling it. The difference between History with the capital ‘H’ and history as everything that happened in the past is crucial. The former is carefully picked out from the latter – a series of events  and artefacts chosen to tell a story. The historian then carefully selects these ‘chosen ones’ to help shape the narrative they wish to see furthered; a narrative that is intrinsically based on the politics of the day.

The question raised then is why should someone care about this act of selection now? The answer is simple, everyday instances like the renaming of roads, the demolition of buildings and the rebuilding of common spaces reinforce this act of selection. One such undertaking that makes one stop and think about this is the Central Vista Redevelopment Project.

The project aims to renovate 86 acres of land in New Delhi, including historical buildings like the Parliament House, the Rashtrapati Bhawan, and the India Gate. Moreover, the National Museum is also set to be taken down and rebuilt where the current North and South Blocks stand in the Central Secretariat. The area, associated with affluence and political power is commonly called Lutyens Delhi after the architects Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker who designed it when the capital was shifted to Delhi in 1911 under the British rule.

Ever since its announcement in September 2019 by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, the project has come under scrutiny for violations of municipal and environmental law as well as change in land use. Following this, the Supreme Court gave it the green light in January 2021. Close to a month prior to January, Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid the foundation of a new Parliament building under a Hindu ceremony. The ceremony itself was allowed when the government reassured the court that no demolition or construction would begin until the final decision had been received. 

The focus of this article, however, is to draw attention to something that seems fairly inconspicuous at first but can have lasting impacts on how we associate our present with our past. The act of demolition and consequently rebuilding employs the historical process mentioned earlier – that of selection and by extension erasure of what gets chosen to be rebuilt and featured. With the National Museum for instance, the idea is that North and South Blocks will be able to house more historical artefacts. However, which artefacts are highlighted and how are questions that remain to be answered. 

The entire episode reminds me of something Susan Sontag said in relation to photography – “[To photograph] means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge – and, therefore, like power.” While she was talking about the act of framing something within photographic borders, the idea at its crux seems especially relevant here – when somebody controls the framing of the past, they wield power. Perhaps, therefore, the same self-reflectivity is required for the curation of renovated spaces.

While the words ‘heritage’, ‘redevelopment’ and ‘conservation’ paint rosy pictures in one’s mind about the building of new spaces, they actually point to the larger question of historical knowledge production. Buildings and architecture has always been used to assert power, symbolise progress and display grandeur. The act of rebuilding is not unique either, as history is replete with examples of the same. That being said, the question, especially with an edifice like the National Museum is its current housing of historical artefacts, and the process of curation that will go into the remade property. 

While the aforementioned already acts as a repository of history, the other buildings like the current Parliament House are receptacles of public memory of post-colonial India while themselves being colonial products. The Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) is a prime example of a building set to be taken down which is associated with the memory of a former Prime Minister. Founded by Kapila Vatsyayan, it is a space where art has found expression during nationally significant events. Keeping the relevance of these in mind therefore becomes important as contemporary history may be memory for now, but it will not remain so for the coming decades. This highlights the importance of preserving not just historical remains but also elements of post-independence public memory that have not become canonical History yet.

Preserving public memory, if nothing else, can create context. They point to the uncomfortable understanding that even if features do not fit proposed narratives, they cannot be razed. For instance, the reason behind the decision to withdraw the candidature of colonial Delhi and Shahjahanabad as UNESCO World Heritage sites in 2014 has been traced by some to their legacies rooted in the Mughal period and the colonial era. While the legacies may cause discomfort to some, their significance cannot be dismissed.

The Central Vista Project sheds light on the importance of history and public memory. The fact is that the past cannot speak for itself. Whatever the past says, it does through the actors who consolidate it. The thing to keep in mind then in light of the project is this – demolishing heritage buildings should not open up the passageway to raze history.

Sanya is a student of History, International Relations and Media Studies at Ashoka University.

We publish all articles under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noderivatives license. This means any news organisation, blog, website, newspaper or newsletter can republish our pieces for free, provided they attribute the original source (OpenAxis).