Making of the Constitution

Reviewed by M. Rajivlochan

Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India 
by Ananya Vajpeyi. 
Harvard University Press.
Pages 342. Rs 796

Across the world people have noted that India and Indians tend to be righteous about everything. The irony is that the texts from ancient India only tell us of virtue and sin are as stated by the wise people. There are no external markers. Under the circumstances, Vajpeyi conducts an investigation into the efforts of Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar, Rabindranath and Abanindranath Tagore to find how they went about figuring out the nature of self-rule for India, a rule where there will be a distinction between right and wrong.

Each had their own version of what India and Indian meant. For them, it was a journey of personal re-invention of Indic traditions. The most preposterous was by Gandhi, going contrary to all extant wisdom, in his book The Gita According to Gandhi. He insisted that the Bhagvad Gita cannot be seen as a dialogue on the battle field between Krishna and Arjuna about whether to fight a righteous war or not.

No doubt the Gita has a strong dharmic message to convey but to abstract it from its context altogether tells us clearly that Gandhi was not really concerned with what Krishna was trying to tell Arjuna. He was trying to find a personal message, which could inspire him and the people of India.

Vajpeyi recognises this process of re-invention. Nehru’s adulation of Asoka as one who brought ‘the whole of India under one supreme government’, she says, was not so much Asoka’s as Nehru’s own dream. Yet she clings to the hope that there might have been some specific message relating to governance and administration that Asoka wished to convey in his public pronouncements. She tries to see a willingness to deal with the nitty-gritty of artha, of purposive goal-directed action, in Asoka’s issuing of orders for construction of rest houses and hospitals, protection of flora and fauna, planting of trees, etc. Certainly in the Rock Edicts, Asoka does make such statements but one has to be really innocent to presume that a king’s statement of ethical concerns amounted to the existence of institutional structures of a state system.

The idea of general rules or norms or principles of governance, which could be enforced by the state, was foreign to early India. Indeed it often seems foreign to us even today. The state in India in the sense of an organised community governed by some common state-enforced norms never really existed. Whatever went by name of a state and the king as a representative of that state, merely seem to have existed on the margins of society as a more or less dispensable entity, until such time as the British arrived on the scene. No wonder that people in India switched loyalties to newer rulers so fast. Or those rulers were rarely able to build up disciplined armies which could defend their kingdoms. The Mughals made this attempt, but it did not last long and even in their case, their armies eventually consisted of far more of provincial contingents than a central core.

Ambedkar seems to have been the only one who sensed that no political self could be rooted in India’s past. He then made a clean break from tradition, zeroed in on Buddhism for being an Indic religion, which at least seemed to talk of equality. But Ambedkar’s version of Buddhism was so radically different from what the Buddha taught that to even call it Buddhism may be an exaggeration. He even denied the validity of the concept of the Four Noble Truths as the key to existence.

Ambedkar alone of all leaders of India emphasised that the people in his India were citizens of a modern state, who should carry none of the baggage of centuries-old injustices and who deserved a modern constitution made on the lines of European norms.

Surely, it is surprising that a centuries-old society accepted the Constitution of India, based on European norms, without so much as a whimper of protest. Perhaps there was no protest because there was very little which the Constitution of India was displacing so far as the state and its powers were concerned.