Q.Why is the Constitution-making called unrepresentative? Does that make the Constitution itself unrepresentative? Give reasons.
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Start your 14-day free trial to unlock the full solution →The making of the Constitution is called unrepresentative because the Constituent Assembly was chosen under a restricted franchise (adult franchise did not yet exist) and its members mostly came from socially advanced sections. But this makes the process unrepresentative in only one specific sense — it does not make the Constitution's actual content unrepresentative, because the debates still captured a genuinely wide range of social opinion.
The chapter's own answer rests on distinguishing two separate components of representation: voice and opinion. The 'voice' component asks whether people were represented in their own language, through representatives they themselves chose — and by this test, the Constituent Assembly genuinely is unrepresentative, since it was formed through a restricted, not universal, franchise, and drew disproportionately from the more educated and privileged sections of society.
The 'opinion' component asks a different question: did the range of views and concerns present in Indian society actually get raised and debated within the Assembly? Here the picture looks quite different. The claim that virtually every shade of opinion was represented may be somewhat exaggerated, but it is not baseless — the actual Constituent Assembly Debates show members raising a genuinely wide range of issues, based not only on personal preoccupations but on the perceived concerns of many different social sections. The chapter offers a striking piece of supporting evidence: it is not a coincidence that the central square of many small Indian towns carries a statue of Dr Ambedkar holding a copy of the Constitution — this is not a hollow symbolic tribute, but reflects a genuine feeling among Dalits that the Constitution's content reflects many of their own aspirations, something that would be hard to explain if the process had produced a document reflecting only the narrow interests of the privileged few wh …
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