Criticisms

For all its achievements, the Indian Constitution can be — and has been — subjected to a number of criticisms, of which three deserve brief mention here: that it is unwieldy, that it is unrepresentative, and that it is alien to Indian conditions. The first criticism, that the Constitution is unwieldy (unusually long and detailed), rests on the assumption that an entire country's constitution must be found within one single compact document. But this assumption is not even true of countries that do have famously compact constitutions, such as the United States — a country's constitution, properly understood, is not identical to a single compact written document, since other documents can carry constitutional status too. Many countries, for instance, do not include provisions for institutions such as the Election Commission or a Civil Service Commission within their constitutional text at all. India is different only in that it chose to place many such matters — details, practices and statements that other countries leave to ordinary legislation — inside the one constitutional document itself, which is what has made that document unusually large. The second criticism is that the Constitution is unrepresentative. This traces back to how the Constituent Assembly itself was formed: adult franchise had not yet been granted at that point, and most of its members came from the more socially and economically advanced sections of society. Does this really make the Constitution unrepresentative? Here it helps to distinguish two separate components of representation — 'voice' and 'opinion'. The voice component concerns whether people were represented in their own language and through their own chosen representatives, rather than in the language of colonial masters; judged purely by this standard, the Assembly is indeed unrepresentative, since its members were chosen through a restricted franchise, not universal suffrage. Judged by the second component — opinion — the picture looks rather different: the claim that virtually every shade of opinion found a voice in the Assembly may be somewhat exaggerated, but it is not baseless either. The actual debates show a vast range of issues and opinions raised by members, based not only on their personal concerns but genuinely on the perceived interests and concerns of various social sections. It is not a coincidence, in this light, that the central square of many small Indian towns carries a statue of Dr Ambedkar holding a copy of the Constitution — far from being an empty symbolic tribute, this expresses a real feeling among Dalits that the Constitution reflects many of their own aspirations. The third and final criticism alleges that the Indian Constitution is an entirely alien, borrowed document — copied article by article from Western constitutions, and sitting uneasily with India's own cultural ethos. This criticism is voiced often, including, at times, within the Constituent Assembly itself. K. Hanumanthaiya, on 17 November 1949, captured this feeling memorably: 'we wanted the music of Veena or Sitar, but here we have the music of an English band. That was because our constitution makers were educated that way... That is exactly the kind of Constitution Mahatma Gandhi did not want and did not envisage.' There is real truth to the charge that the Constitution is modern and partly Western in origin — earlier in this book, the various sources it 'borrowed' from have already been listed. But the chapter argues this was never a case of blind borrowing; it was innovative borrowing, which does not make the resulting document entirely alien. First, many Indians did not merely adopt modern ways of thinking passively — they made those ways of thinking genuinely their own, using westernisation as a form of protest against the filth in their own traditions, a trend Rammohan Roy started and which Dalit movements have continued to this day (Dalits of northern India, as early as 1841, were already using the newly introduced modern lega …