Why do we need to go back to the Constituent Assembly?

It is fair to ask why we should look backwards at all — surely tracing the historical roots of legal and political ideas is a job for legal historians, not students of politics? Why not simply take account of how circumstances have changed and redefine the constitution's role for today, instead of tying ourselves to the concerns of people who wrote it decades ago? The answer depends on how much has actually changed. In the American case, the constitution was written in the late eighteenth century, and it would be absurd to apply those era's values and standards directly to the twenty-first century. India's situation is different: the world of the Constitution's original framers and our present-day world have not changed so drastically that we have separated ourselves from it. In terms of the values, ideals and basic conception of society and polity, a history of the Indian Constitution is still very much a history of the present — the same fundamental questions the framers wrestled with (freedom, equality, how to hold together a diverse society) are still the questions India argues about today. There is a further, more practical reason to revisit the Constituent Assembly. Many of India's current legal and political practices rest on reasoning that has simply been forgotten over time — the practices continue, but the reasons behind them have quietly slipped into the background, taken for granted. This forgetting is mostly harmless while things are going smoothly. But when a practice is challenged or threatened, not knowing the underlying principle behind it becomes genuinely harmful, because there is no way to defend or adapt the practice sensibly. To get a proper handle on current constitutional practice — to grasp its value and meaning — there is o …