Introduction

This chapter turns from what the Constitution says to why it says it. Earlier chapters in this book studied the actual provisions of the Constitution and how it worked in practice; this chapter instead asks why the leaders of the national movement felt the need to adopt a constitution at all once independence was won, and why they chose to bind themselves — and every generation after them — to its rules. Answering that means going back to the debates of the Constituent Assembly, because a philosophical reading of the Constitution is incomplete without the reasons its framers gave for the values they embedded in it. The chapter then asks a second question: what kind of constitution did India actually give itself? What objectives did it hope to achieve, do those objectives carry a moral content, and if so what precisely is that content? By the end of the chapter you should be able to explain why studying the philosophy of the Constitution matters, name the core features of the Indian Constitution's political philosophy, and describe both the criticisms levelled at it and the limitations it honestly carries.