India's Constitutional Identity
India's Constitutional Identity

Author: Bidyut Chakrabarty

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-03-04

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 0429016522

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

An analysis of selective aspects of India’s constitutional identity, this book provides an analytical account of the changing and changed texture of India’s constitutional identity bearing in mind the historical context in which it is articulated. The book conceptualizes the gradual evolution of an idea by tracing the history of India’s constitutionalism with reference to its conceptual roots, historical antecedents and the landmark judicial pronouncements in which the concern for its retention and protection is always privileged. The author examines specific constitutional designs that the 1950 Constitution of India put in place and argues that constitutional identity, despite being drawn on specific constitutional provisions, is also changeable in view of the rapidly transforming socio-economic milieu. He demonstrates that there are numerous instances where India’s constitutional identity has undergone a metamorphosis in circumstances where newer politico-ideological values and norms are privileged. A valuable addition to the literature on constitutionalism and constitutional practices in general and their manifestation in India's democratic experiences, in particular, this book will be of interest to academics in the fields of Government, Political Science, Law and Jurisprudence, Constitutional and Legal History and Asian Studies.

Constitutional Identity
Constitutional Identity

Author: Gary J. Jacobsohn

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2010-10-25

Total Pages: 389

ISBN-13: 0674047664

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"Argues that a constitution acquires an identity through experience--from a mix of the political aspirations and commitments that express a nation's past and the desire to transcend that past. It is changeable but resistant to its own destruction and manifests itself in various ways, as Jacobsohn shows in examples as far flung as India, Ireland, Israel, and the United States. Jacobsohn argues that the presence of disharmony--both the tensions within a constitutional order and those that exist between a constitutional document and the society it seeks to regulate--is critical to understnading the theory and dynamics of constitutional identity"--Jacket.

India’s Founding Moment
India’s Founding Moment

Author: Madhav Khosla

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2020-02-04

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0674980875

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

An Economist Best Book of the Year How India’s Constitution came into being and instituted democracy after independence from British rule. Britain’s justification for colonial rule in India stressed the impossibility of Indian self-government. And the empire did its best to ensure this was the case, impoverishing Indian subjects and doing little to improve their socioeconomic reality. So when independence came, the cultivation of democratic citizenship was a foremost challenge. Madhav Khosla explores the means India’s founders used to foster a democratic ethos. They knew the people would need to learn ways of citizenship, but the path to education did not lie in rule by a superior class of men, as the British insisted. Rather, it rested on the creation of a self-sustaining politics. The makers of the Indian Constitution instituted universal suffrage amid poverty, illiteracy, social heterogeneity, and centuries of tradition. They crafted a constitutional system that could respond to the problem of democratization under the most inhospitable conditions. On January 26, 1950, the Indian Constitution—the longest in the world—came into effect. More than half of the world’s constitutions have been written in the past three decades. Unlike the constitutional revolutions of the late eighteenth century, these contemporary revolutions have occurred in countries characterized by low levels of economic growth and education, where voting populations are deeply divided by race, religion, and ethnicity. And these countries have democratized at once, not gradually. The events and ideas of India’s Founding Moment offer a natural reference point for these nations where democracy and constitutionalism have arrived simultaneously, and they remind us of the promise and challenge of self-rule today.

The Constitution of India
The Constitution of India

Author: Arun K Thiruvengadam

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2017-12-28

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 1849468702

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book provides an overview of the content and functioning of the Indian Constitution, with an emphasis on the broader socio-political context. It focuses on the overarching principles and the main institutions of constitutional governance that the world's longest written constitution inaugurated in 1950. The nine chapters of the book deal with specific aspects of the Indian constitutional tradition as it has evolved across seven decades of India's existence as an independent nation. Beginning with the pre-history of the Constitution and its making, the book moves onto an examination of the structural features and actual operation of the Constitution's principal governance institutions. These include the executive and the parliament, the institutions of federalism and local government, and the judiciary. An unusual feature of Indian constitutionalism that is highlighted here is the role played by technocratic institutions such as the Election Commission, the Comptroller and Auditor General, and a set of new regulatory institutions, most of which were created during the 1990s. A considerable portion of the book evaluates issues relating to constitutional rights, directive principles and the constitutional regulation of multiple forms of identity in India. The important issue of constitutional change in India is approached from an atypical perspective. The book employs a narrative form to describe the twists, turns and challenges confronted across nearly seven decades of the working of the constitutional order. It departs from conventional Indian constitutional scholarship in placing less emphasis on constitutional doctrine (as evolved in judicial decisions delivered by the High Courts and the Supreme Court). Instead, the book turns the spotlight on the political bargains and extra-legal developments that have influenced constitutional evolution. Written in accessible prose that avoids undue legal jargon, the book aims at a general audience that is interested in understanding the complex yet fascinating challenges posed by constitutionalism in India. Its unconventional approach to some classic issues will stimulate the more seasoned student of constitutional law and politics.

The Oxford Handbook of the Indian Constitution
The Oxford Handbook of the Indian Constitution

Author: Sujit Choudhry

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2016-05-03

Total Pages: 1328

ISBN-13: 0191058629

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Indian Constitution is one of the world's longest and most important political texts. Its birth, over six decades ago, signalled the arrival of the first major post-colonial constitution and the world's largest and arguably most daring democratic experiment. Apart from greater domestic focus on the Constitution and the institutional role of the Supreme Court within India's democratic framework, recent years have also witnessed enormous comparative interest in India's constitutional experiment. The Oxford Handbook of the Indian Constitution is a wide-ranging, analytical reflection on the major themes and debates that surround India's Constitution. The Handbook provides a comprehensive account of the developments and doctrinal features of India's Constitution, as well as articulating frameworks and methodological approaches through which studies of Indian constitutionalism, and constitutionalism more generally, might proceed. Its contributions range from rigorous, legal studies of provisions within the text to reflections upon historical trends and social practices. As such the Handbook is an essential reference point not merely for Indian and comparative constitutional scholars, but for students of Indian democracy more generally.

A People's Constitution
A People's Constitution

Author: Rohit De

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2020-08-04

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 0691210381

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

It has long been contended that the Indian Constitution of 1950, a document in English created by elite consensus, has had little influence on India’s greater population. Drawing upon the previously unexplored records of the Supreme Court of India, A People’s Constitution upends this narrative and shows how the Constitution actually transformed the daily lives of citizens in profound and lasting ways. This remarkable legal process was led by individuals on the margins of society, and Rohit De looks at how drinkers, smugglers, petty vendors, butchers, and prostitutes—all despised minorities—shaped the constitutional culture. The Constitution came alive in the popular imagination so much that ordinary people attributed meaning to its existence, took recourse to it, and argued with it. Focusing on the use of constitutional remedies by citizens against new state regulations seeking to reshape the society and economy, De illustrates how laws and policies were frequently undone or renegotiated from below using the state’s own procedures. De examines four important cases that set legal precedents: a Parsi journalist’s contestation of new alcohol prohibition laws, Marwari petty traders’ challenge to the system of commodity control, Muslim butchers’ petition against cow protection laws, and sex workers’ battle to protect their right to practice prostitution. Exploring how the Indian Constitution of 1950 enfranchised the largest population in the world, A People’s Constitution considers the ways that ordinary citizens produced, through litigation, alternative ethical models of citizenship.

Politics and Ethics of the Indian Constitution
Politics and Ethics of the Indian Constitution

Author: Rajeev Bhargava

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 428

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Much of the germinal work on the Indian Constitution has been done by legal experts and historians. The distinctiveness of this collection of essays is its focus on the Indian Constitution from the perspective of political theory. Contributors to this volume view the Constitution either as a political or as an ethical document, reflecting configurations of powr and interests or articulating a moral vision. Critically analysing the various aspects of the constitution, the essays discuss equality, freedom, citizenship, minority rights, democracy, rights, property and welfare.

Constitutional Idolatry and Democracy
Constitutional Idolatry and Democracy

Author: Brian Christopher Jones

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

Published: 2020-06-26

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1788971108

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Constitutional Idolatry and Democracy investigates the increasingly important subject of constitutional idolatry and its effects on democracy. Focussed around whether the UK should draft a single written constitution, it suggests that constitutions have been drastically and persistently over-sold throughout the years, and that their wider importance and effects are not nearly as significant as constitutional advocates maintain. Chapters analyse whether written constitutions can educate the citizenry, invigorate voter turnout, or deliver ‘We the People’ sovereignty.

The Transformative Constitution
The Transformative Constitution

Author: Gautam Bhatia

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2019-02-28

Total Pages: 544

ISBN-13: 9353026857

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

| Shortlisted for the Tata Literature Live Non-fiction Book of the Year Award and Hindu Prize for Non-fiction | We think of the Indian Constitution as a founding document, embodying a moment of profound transformation from being ruled to becoming a nation of free and equal citizenship. Yet the working of the Constitution over the last seven decades has often failed to fulfil that transformative promise.Not only have successive Parliaments failed to repeal colonial-era laws that are inconsistent with the principles of the Constitution, but constitutional challenges to these laws have also failed before the courts. Indeed, in numerous cases, the Supreme Court has used colonial-era laws to cut down or weaken the fundamental rights. The Transformative Constitution by Gautam Bhatia draws on pre-Independence legal and political history to argue that the Constitution was intended to transform not merely the political status of Indians from subjects to citizens, but also the social relationships on which legal and political structures rested. He advances a novel vision of the Constitution, and of constitutional interpretation, which is faithful to its text, structure and history, and above all to its overarching commitment to political and social transformation.

Citizenship and Its Discontents
Citizenship and Its Discontents

Author: Niraja Gopal Jayal

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2013-02-15

Total Pages: 454

ISBN-13: 0674070992

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Breaking new ground in scholarship, Niraja Jayal writes the first history of citizenship in the largest democracy in the world—India. Unlike the mature democracies of the west, India began as a true republic of equals with a complex architecture of citizenship rights that was sensitive to the many hierarchies of Indian society. In this provocative biography of the defining aspiration of modern India, Jayal shows how the progressive civic ideals embodied in the constitution have been challenged by exclusions based on social and economic inequality, and sometimes also, paradoxically, undermined by its own policies of inclusion. Citizenship and Its Discontents explores a century of contestations over citizenship from the colonial period to the present, analyzing evolving conceptions of citizenship as legal status, as rights, and as identity. The early optimism that a new India could be fashioned out of an unequal and diverse society led to a formally inclusive legal membership, an impulse to social and economic rights, and group-differentiated citizenship. Today, these policies to create a civic community of equals are losing support in a climate of social intolerance and weak solidarity. Once seen by Western political scientists as an anomaly, India today is a site where every major theoretical debate about citizenship is being enacted in practice, and one that no global discussion of the subject can afford to ignore.