National identity

Even while accommodating regional and cultural difference through asymmetric federalism, the Constitution constantly reinforces a common national identity — India, as studied in the chapter on federalism, strives to retain regional identities alongside a shared national one, rather than choosing between them. This shows that a common national identity was never treated as incompatible with distinct religious or linguistic identities under the Indian Constitution; rather, the Constitution tries to balance the two. Even so, preference was given to the common, national identity under certain specific conditions. This is clearest in the framers' rejection of separate electorates based on religious identity — a mechanism under which voters of a given religious community would elect representatives only from within their own community, on a separate roll. The Constituent Assembly rejected this not because separate electorates would have fostered difference between religious communities as such, nor because they would have simply endangered some vague, simple notion of national unity, but because they were seen as endangering a healthy national life in a more concrete sense: fostering permanent, institutionalised division rather than integration. Rather than imposing a forced, artificial unity, the Constitution instead sought to evolve a genuine sense of fraternity — a goal that was especially close to Dr Ambedkar's own vision for the Constitution. As Sardar Patel put it in the Constituent Assembly on 25 May 1949, the framers' central objective w …