Q.The Japanese Constitution was made under US occupation and could not contradict US wishes. Do you see a problem in this? How was the Indian experience different?

A constitution's mode of promulgation — how it came into being and how much genuine authority its framers had — shapes whether it survives; a constitution imposed under foreign occupation lacks exactly the kind of domestic legitimacy that durable constitutions need. …

The chapter's discussion of "mode of promulgation" argues that a constitution's real durability depends heavily on how it came into being and how much genuine authority its actual framers possessed. Constitutions crafted by unpopular or externally-imposed authorities, without independent domestic legitimacy, tend to remain fragile or defunct, while the most successful constitutions in the world — India's, South Africa's, the United States' — emerged from popular national movements that had already earned wide public trust.

The Japanese Constitution, made while the US occupation army still controlled Japan, and unable to contain any provision the US government disapproved of, structurally could not draw on this kind of independent domestic legitimacy — its content was constrained not by Japan's own political process but by an external occupying power's wishes, which is precisely the problem the chapter's framework flags: legitimacy that doesn't come from the people the constitution is meant to govern. …