The Constitution Of India As A Tool Of Resistance
By Bobby Kunhu
27 January, 2010
Countercurrents.org
In June 2001, when my good friend and activist, John Abraham from
Punthamba, Maharastra was arrested by the police under the draconian
legislation Maharashtra Control of Organised Crimes Act, 1999 for the
offense of having mobilized Adivasis for demanding their right to land
and livelihood, the evidence that the police gathered from his
residence (before the charges under MCOCA were dropped) were copies of
the Das Kapital and a land rights Advocacy Update published by the
National Centre of Advocacy Studies. In my opinion, the police missed
a more important subversive document that was in his library – a
document that lent more credibility and substance to the struggle that
he was involved in – the Constitution of India!
At the threshold of the celebrations of the 60th anniversary of the
birthing of the Republic of India, the Government of India seems to be
guilty of either being blissfully unaware or willfully subverting that
document, purportedly sanctioned by, "we, the people", from which it
draws its own legitimacy – the Constitution of India! On the one hand,
the government, while admitting its own failure in ensuring
development is engaged in an extra-judicial and unconstitutional war
against a section of the group constituting "we, the people", on the
behest of non-people in the guise of Operation Greenhunt. While on the
other the, colossal injustices against large sections of peoples
remain unaddressed. The quarter year to the run-up to the 60th
anniversary of the Republic alone has seen a number of anniversaries
of unaddressed injustices – just to list a couple of those that hit
silver jubilees last year – the Bhopal Gas Leak and the anti-Sikh
riots – apart from the unmentioned violence and deprivation faced by a
large majority of the peoples particularly from the marginalized
sections and the newer injustices that were unleashed in 2009 and
might see anniversaries of State apathy in the future.
For me, the politics of anniversaries of injustice holds special
significance, especially in an increasingly neo-liberal paradigm. It
is precisely these anniversaries that would tend to appropriate the
celebrations of the 60th anniversary of the Republic of India and
re-appropriate the Constitution of India as a document that was
artfully negotiated to represent the aspirations of the marginalized –
assert a narrative conspicuously missing from Constitutional History
courses and Civics syllabus! A time to relocate the roots of the
Constitution of India from the Government of India Act, 1935 to the
1932 Poona Pact in mainstream national historical discourses.
The Poona Pact is often relegated to a negotiation on separate
electorates for Dalits. The truth is more complex and needs to be seen
through a prism where the Ambedkar persona represents the aspirations
of the communities with ascriptive disabilities and the Gandhi persona
as representative of the Savarna interests in all its manifestations.
There can be no better evidence for this than the fact that the
backdrop for the negotiations for the Poona Pact was the All India
Depressed Classes Conference convened under the leadership of none
other than Shyama Prasad Mookerjee – a congressman then, and one of
the chief architects and pioneers of the Hindutva ideology, a patron
of the RSS and founder of the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, the predecessor of
BJP. Interestingly, neither Ambedkar nor Gandhi participated in this
conference. While a range of Congressmen including Mookerjee were seen
as representing Gandhi at the Conference, Ambedkar was represented by
a lone Rajah, a Dalit leader from Tamil Nadu, who acted as the
go-between.
Multiple mainstream sources including wikipedia tend to suggest that
the Ramsay MacDonald's communal award or separate electorates for
Dalits was wrested in the backdrop of Gandhi's boycott of the 1930-32
Round Table conference. I would believe it was the intellectual force
and rootedness of Ambedkar's arguments that the British government
gave in to. This necessitated that the negotiations had to be carried
out with Ambedkar and not the MacDonald government – though in
hindsight, one could speculate that Gandhi might have preferred
negotiating with the latter. These negotiations and the Poona Pact
thereafter, that was wrested after considerably arm-twisting Ambedkar
had a definitive role in the evolution of the Constitutional History
of India.
This also ensured that Ambedkar's position with regard to the future
round table conferences and more importantly, along with his
intellectual clarity and Constitutional expertise, I believe that it
earned him the Chair of the Drafting Committee of the Constitution of
India rather than any imagined Nehruvian largesse or benevolence.
Mainstream historical prejudice in this regard can be seen from the
way Gandhian non-violence is privileged over the more difficult
non-violent struggle that Ambedkar waged overcoming ascriptive
disabilities and finally embracing the most non-violent of religions –
Buddhism!
Regardless of what Arun Shourie and his ilk have to shout from
rooftops, Chritophe Jaffrelot, demonstrates clearly and succinctly the
role that Ambedkar played in defining the architecture of the
Constitution of India. He postulates this as the "revenge on Gandhi by
a westernised democrat", where he is referring to the role played by
Ambedkar in defining the contents of the Fundamental Rights chapter of
the Constitution within his own ideological framework – largely
influenced by his caste experience and an utilitarian liberalism and
the relegation of Gandhian principles, to a non-enforceable Directive
Principles of State Policy.
Interestingly the Judiciary has asserted the centrality of Ambedkar's
vision of the architecture of the Constitution of India in evolving
the Basic Structure Doctrine and predominance of place given to the
fundamental rights chapter. It is precisely this vision that also came
to the rescue of the Indian democracy in the aftermath of the dark
days of the Emergency. It is also fascinating to note how this vision
has been progressively used by the Judiciary, particularly in the days
of evolution of Judicial Activism in trying to secure socio-economic
justice within the paradigm of Constitutional Rights particularly
vis-à-vis marginalized communities.
It is in this context that it becomes important to read the history of
the Constitution of India as being rooted in the Poona Pact,
re-appropriate the Constitution of India as a document representing
the aspirations of marginalized communities, be it Dalits, Adivasis,
religious or sexuality minorities, women or whomsoever and use it as a
tool of resistance against subversions by State and non- State actors!
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