Introduction

This chapter opens the book Indian Constitution at Work and lays the foundation for everything that follows. Before the later chapters take up elections, governments, presidents and prime ministers, this chapter steps back to a more basic question: where does the entire structure of government, and the principles that bind every institution of government, actually come from? The answer is the Constitution of India. By the end of this chapter you should be able to explain what a constitution actually means, what a constitution does for a society, how a constitution governs the allocation of power within a society, and how the Constitution of India itself came to be made.