Procedural Achievements

The features already covered — individual freedom, social justice, respect for diversity and minority rights, secularism, universal franchise, federalism and national identity — are what the chapter calls the Constitution's substantive achievements: achievements about the actual content or values the Constitution enshrines.

But alongside these, the Constitution can also be credited with genuine procedural achievements — achievements about the manner or process by which those values came to be adopted. The first procedural achievement is that the Indian Constitution reflects a real faith in political deliberation. It is true that many groups and interests were not adequately represented in the Constituent Assembly itself. Even so, the actual debates within the Assembly show that its members genuinely tried to be as inclusive as possible in how they approached decisions — this open-ended approach reflects a real willingness among the framers to revise their own existing preferences, in short, to justify the outcomes they reached by appeal to reasons rather than to naked self-interest. It also demonstrates a willingness to recognise real, creative value in difference and disagreement, rather than treating dissent as simply an obstacle to be overridden. The second procedural achievement is that the process reflects a genuine spirit of compromise and accommodation. These two words — compromise and accommodation — should not automatically be treated with suspicion or disapproval; not every compromise is a bad one. A compromise is only objectionable in the bad sense when something of real value is traded away for mere narrow self-interest. But when one value is only partially traded off for another, especially through an open process of free deliberation among equals, the resulting compromise can hardly be objected to on principle. We might regret that not everything of value could be secured all at once, but that regret does not make the comprom …