Tag: freedom

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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 11

Bombay Begums

What made me watch Alankrita Shrivastava’s six-episode Netflix series Bombay Begums was its title itself – laden with royalty. Watching the trailer, one could possibly ask, why call the lives of five women located in the city of dreams ‘begums?’ Each episode delves into the anxieties of these women’s private yet socially relevant lives. Their engagement with the ‘social’ reveals concealed realities of their ‘personal.’ Rani Irani, Fatima Warsi, Lakshmi Gondhali, Ayesha and Shai, with all their vulnerabilities in a man’s world “mend the pieces and move on, until it happens again.”  

“We are all part of the problem, Fatima …” aptly puts across our attitude towards preserving power while discrediting the powerless. The characters depict complexities accompanying the notions of power, freedom, dignity, sexuality, and integrity within a queen’s realm. It leaves one with thoughts that the world is too hesitant to express. The dialogues, narration, and the plot does not miss out on any opportunity to critique ways in which the patriarchal world fails each time it tries to understand women’s language of desire, power and respect. The series is flawed in its own ways, and that’s exactly how the lives of these women play out. Flawed. Yet unapologetic. 

These women are artists – with art fading at every possible turn of their lives, but their firm determination towards striking their brush once more, on that empty canvas, speaks for itself.  Their strength to assert their power in an oppressive world is what makes them the begums.

Another interesting aspect of the series – five out of the six episodes are named after books by eminent women writers who have aspired to live through all the lows and highs in their own, independent journeys. The plot of these episodes stays inseparable from their names, depicting relevant connections between women’s stories from a foreign land in a city closer to home.

“Our wounds can heal, and our souls blossom. And the jagged and sparkling dreams of women can find both earth and sky,” summarises the series at its best. With all the critiques and applauds that the series has received a month into its release, Bombay Begums is a must-watch for all.

Picture Credits: Tribune India

Ariba is a student of English and Media Studies at Ashoka University.

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Issue 11

Examining India’s Falling Rank on the World Happiness Index

Sydney J. Harris rightly said, “Happiness is a direction, not a place” and today all economies in the world are struggling to walk in this direction. A step to achieve this was taken in the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network in 2012 when they adopted resolution 65/309: Happiness: Towards a Holistic Definition of Development. This was done to invite the 149 member countries to measure the level of happiness among their population and use these numbers to guide public policy. Although the World Happiness Reports have been based on a wide variety of data, the most important source has always been the Gallup World Poll, which is unique in the range and comparability of its global series of annual surveys.

Finland has been ranked number 1, being the happiest country in the world for the past few years. India has always been very low on the happiness index, averaging around 125th. In fact, in 2021, India was ranked 139 out of 149 countries. The results of the happiness index are correlated with a lot of factors including GDP, social security, personal freedom, life expectancy and opinions of residents among others. 

As former President, Dr Pranab Mukherjee commented, “Despite our country’s economic progress, India is constantly going downwards in the happiness index. This indicates a lack of a holistic approach towards development.” According to him, the best step that the policymakers of the country should take is to adopt the ‘triple bottom line’ accounting framework. It focuses on all essential aspects of holistic development of individuals including social, ecological and financial development. This also implies that happiness is weakly correlated with wealth and the economic growth of a country. 

According to the economist and author Jayshree Sengupta, India has been ranked poorly on the happiness index due to various reasons. Some of these are rapid urbanization and congestion in cities, concerns about food security and water safety, rising costs of healthcare, women’s safety, and environmental pollution, which itself is linked to poor mental wellbeing. These conditions have worsened over time and were amplified due to the Covid-19 crisis. 

The ever-growing inequality between the rich and poor of the country is another crucial reason for the chronic unhappiness. During the Covid crisis,  India reportedly added 40 new billionaires to the global list while about 57% of the working class in the country were on the verge of losing their jobs. This growing pay gap in the population has worsened the mental wellbeing and hence the happiness of the population. 

A statistical exercise using variables like GDP per capita, social support, healthy life expectancy, freedom to make life choices, generosity, perceptions of corruption and dystopia was done to understand the relationship of these indices with the happiness index. It found that all these variables are statistically significant and thus have  significant explanatory power. They  illustrate that on average richer countries fare better on subjective evaluations of life circumstances, as do nations with more social support, lower levels of corruption etc. 

Why India, despite its high level of economic growth ranks so low is because it ranks very low on some of these indices. For social support, India is ranked 142nd out of 149 countries. However, if we consider Pakistan’s ranking on all of these individual indicators, it is very similar to India and worse in some cases. According to this, India should be ranked one spot above Pakistan but that is not the case. Pakistan is ranked 105 while India is ranked at 139. This points out to predictive anomalies that this model has. 

One reasonable explanation for this could be that people in India have higher expectations and thus also have greater disappointment. This is one of the very crucial reasons for the low happiness ranking in India in addition to the increasing income inequality and feelings of injustice and unfairness because of the structure of the society and its history. Thus, better political leadership and public policy framework in India are essential for improving the happiness index of people in India. 

Picture Credits: Visual Capitalist

Aanya Poddar is a third year undergraduate student at Ashoka University. She is pursuing a BSc. (Honors) in Economics and Finance. She is the President of the Ashoka Economics Society.

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 8

Why making money isn’t the Recipe for Social Change: A response to Manu Joseph’s suggestion for youngsters

On the 14th of February, 2021, environmental activist Disha Ravi was arrested on charges of sedition for sharing a ‘toolkit’ and supporting farmers’ protests online. She was charged for being part of a ‘global conspiracy’ because she was associated with Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future. Following her arrest, Manu Joseph, a recognised journalist, and columnist for live mint magazine wrote an opinion piece, suggesting a plan of action for the ‘sound minded’ Indian youth, to truly bring about social change. Joseph not only critiqued various young Indians’ choices to be activists but also suggested they would serve the country better if they found jobs, started on a ‘doomed business’ and aided the economy instead of “fighting battles they do not understand”. 

While the opening lines of his piece truly baffle me as part of the generation he is addressing, I cannot overlook how these ideas resonate with the larger Indian public his age. The assumption that the only correct way to bring change in society is by becoming a part of the system which the youth believes needs to change is one of the primary differences between Manu Joseph’s generation and ours. Equating young protestors and activists to misguided and unemployed individuals with nothing better to do is an easy narrative most of us have heard over dining table conversations with our parents. However, the question we all must ask is why the ‘privileged youth’ of ‘sound mind’ choose to protest if the avenues for economic and political upheaval were an easy alternative. Manu Joseph, in his piece, writes that contemporary activism in India is influenced by the West, if not an extension of it and fails because it does not have the same humanitarian networks backing it as the United States does. But what this ‘practical’ advice and observation seems to ignore is that young activists in India choose to speak up despite the system and its flaws, and not because they are unaware of the lack of protection from non-state organisations and the consequences of their actions but to get rid of the pattern itself. 

Joseph argues that the most effective way for the youth to ‘serve their nation’ and ‘take care of the unlucky ones’ is through encashing on the for-profit world, rather than ‘choosing the easy option of festive grandstanding and do-gooding, which is often harmful, at best useless or an inefficient way to make the world a better place.’ When Joseph states that choosing activism is the ‘easy option,’ he contradicts himself and his point about state scrutiny for activists and the lack of a humanitarian organisational mechanism for the protection of these individuals. If protests and sharing a ‘toolkit’ was in fact ‘inefficient and useless’, and ‘an easy option of festive grandstanding’, a 22-year-old, unemployed youth would not have been scrutinised and subjected to charges of sedition by the government, and young protestors would not need a mechanism to protect themselves from state action. 

Another argument that Joseph makes, which is also commonly used against the youth in this country is that they do not understand their battles and are influenced by Western ideas and aspirations which often only work in the West. A response from the ‘young’ to these arguments would be to ask questions about their assumed naivety, address how the State, since its inception has borrowed several ideas from the West and continues to do so. Western ideas and aspirations are not merely being used by the youth today, but have been part of discourse across the country since its inception. Further, protest and activism are not merely borrowed Western concepts but have been part of the country’s political culture throughout history, be it Gandhi’s call to protest for Independence, or the ‘Jungle Bachao Andolan’ by tribals in Singhbhum. Joseph says that, “The young who hope to be “good trouble” can be ruined by the state, and their handlers, who use them to achieve political and ideological ends, cannot always save them”. The understanding that the young will be, and can be ruined by the state, and their ‘handlers’ will not be able to save them is premised on the belief that these activists have ‘handlers’ and are being influenced by people who will not be able to support them in the long run, completely negating the youth’s ability to think, reason, form opinions and then act.

The Court granted bail to Disha Ravi on the account of the contents of the toolkit being ‘innocuous’ and denied any account of her being part of a larger conspiracy to harm either the state or any particular community. However, the action taken by the government, and the article written by Joseph represent sentiments against the young and their actions, often misunderstood, simply because they are forms of direct dissent and expressions of freedom instead of the path that the youth has always been expected to follow. Maybe, the problem is not that activists are misinformed, unaware, gloomy individuals seeking a moral advantage as saviours for the ‘unlucky’ but that, the way they choose to bring about change is different, more spontaneous than the generations before them. Maybe, all of us truly believe that, ‘We have only one job: if we are lucky, we must take care of the unlucky; everything else is merely an argument about the best way’, as Manu Joseph puts it, and our generation’s way is different from his, possibly because of avenues like social media that connects us globally. Maybe we are not after the drug of ‘do-gooding’ alone but are only seeking different means to make the world a better place. 

Saman Fatima is a third-year History Major at Ashoka University, who is often found sketching or reading for leisure when not immersing herself in mandatory class assignments. 

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).