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1 results

  • 1 - ‘Our Constitution’

  • Rohit De, Yale University, Connecticut, Ornit Shani, University of Haifa, Israel
  • Book:
    Assembling India’s Constitution
    Published online:
    24 September 2025
    Print publication:
    09 October 2025, pp 23-63

  • Summary

    The chapter examines the public’s ideas and aspirations about the future constitution, through thousands of letters and memoranda that diverse publics sent to the Constituent Assembly. The public’s demands were informed by their everyday life experiences, generating constitutional ideas that would take years to find their ways into global constitutional governance. We focus on the new politics of caste that emerged with the promise of a transformative constitution, wherein caste groups invoked and disseminated the language and vocabulary of liberal constitutionalism for both regressive and progressive aims. We uncover a fuller range of public voices absent from the Constituent Assembly. The public demands were based on deliberative process of reasoning, and often grounded on universal principles that would apply to all groups. We thus uncover in this chapter a reservoir of public constitutional thinking, a body of constitutional theory that emerged from India’s streets.