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A People's Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic

How to Write New Constitutional Histories? The Casebook of Everyday Life

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 March 2021

Rohit DE
Rohit DE*
Affiliation:
Yale Law School, USArohit.de@yale.edu
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Extract

I am grateful to Professor Mathew John for his deep and rigorous engagement with A People's Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic, and to the editors of this journal for giving me the opportunity to be in dialogue with some of the questions he raises.

Type
Review Essay
Information
Asian Journal of Comparative Law , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , December 2020 , pp. 394 - 401
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the National University of Singapore

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References

1. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, ‘Can the subaltern speak?’, in Morris, Rosalind C (ed), Can the Subaltern Speak? Reflections on the History of an Idea (Columbia University Press 2010) 21–78Google Scholar.

2. De, Rohit, A People's Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic (Princeton University Press 2018) 182–209Google Scholar (‘A People's Constitution’).

3. State of Uttar Pradesh v Kaushalya Devi AIR 1964 SC 416.

4. Austin, Granville, Working a Democratic Constitution: A History of the Indian Experience (Oxford University Press 1999) 771Google Scholar; Dhavan, Rajeev, The Supreme Court of India: A Socio-Legal Critique of its Juristic Techniques (NM Tripathi 1977)Google Scholar.

5. Krishnaswamy, Sudhir, Democracy and Constitutionalism in India: A Study of the Basic Structure Doctrine (Oxford University Press 2009)Google Scholar.

6. AIR 1950 SC 27. Given John's understanding of a subaltern as a demographic category, it is unclear whether AK Gopalan, a high caste Nambiar who would go on to be a five-term MP, would qualify as a subaltern citizen.

7. De, Rohit, ‘Rebellion, dacoity, and equality: the emergence of the constitutional field in postcolonial India’ (2014) 34 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 260CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The key petitions included those by a working-class Muslim and a lower caste Hindu who had been arrested and tried by a Special Court for participating in communist violence.

8. Scheppele, Kim Lane, ‘Constitutional Ethnography: An Introduction’ (2004) 38 Law and Society Review 389, 390–391CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9. On free speech, see Bhatia, Gautam, Offend, shock, or disturb: Free speech under the Indian Constitution (Oxford University Press 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chandrachud, Abhinav, The Republic of Rhetoric: Free Speech and the Constitution of India (Penguin 2017)Google Scholar; Dhawan, Rajeev, Publish and Be Damned! Censorship and Intolerance in India (Tulika Books 2008)Google Scholar. On religion, see Sen, Ronojoy, Articles of Faith: Religion, Secularism and the Indian Supreme Court (Oxford University Press 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kapur, Ratna & Crossman, Brenda, Secularism's Last Sigh: Hindutva and the (Mis)Rule of Law (Oxford University Press 1999)Google Scholar; Ahmed, Farrah, Religious Freedom under the Personal Law System (Oxford University Press 2016)Google Scholar.

10. A number of recent works follow Uday Mehta's early observation of the centrality of the social question in the Constitution of India. See Uday Singh Mehta, ‘The Social Question and the Absolutism of Politics’ (Presentation at ‘We the People: A Symposium on the Constitution of India After 60 Years, 1950–2010’) (Nov 2010) <https://www.india-seminar.com/2010/615/615_uday_s_mehta.htm> accessed 6 Dec 2020; Ramnath, Kalyani, ‘We the People: Seamless Webs and Social Revolution in the Indian Constituent Assembly Debates’ (2012) 32 South Asia Research 57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Khosla, Madhav, India's Founding Moment: The Constitution of a Most Surprising Democracy (Harvard University Press 2020)Google Scholar; Sandipto Dasgupta, Legalizing the Revolution: Decolonization and Constitutionalism in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

11. Khilnani, Sunil, The Idea of India (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1999) 41Google Scholar.

12. Massey, IP, Administrative Law (7th ed, Eastern Book Co 2008) 14Google Scholar. See also A People's Constitution (n 2) 23.

13. Other groups mentioned in the book include refugees, Muslims facing deportation orders, school children, petty government servants, vegetable vendors, sweepers, milkmen, and linguistic minorities. I discuss some of these in the following works: De, Rohit, ‘A Republic of Petty Bureaucrats: Upendra Baxi and the Pathologies of Civil Service Jurisprudence’ (2018) 9 Jindal Global Law Review 335CrossRefGoogle Scholar; De, Rohit, ‘Taming the Custodian: Rethinking the Archive of Evacuee Property’, in Prakash, Gyan, Laffan, Michael & Menon, Nikhil (eds), The postcolonial moment in South and Southeast Asia (Bloomsbury 2018) 87–110Google Scholar.

14. A People's Constitution relies on published quantitative work on the period, including Gadbois, George H Jr, ‘Indian Judicial Behavior’ (1970) 5 Economic and Political Weekly 147Google Scholar; Gadbois, George H Jr, ‘The Supreme Court of India: A Preliminary Report of an Empirical Study’ (1970) 4 Journal of Constitutional and Parliamentary Studies 33Google Scholar; Dhawan, Rajeev, The Supreme Court of India: A Socio-legal Critique of Its Juristic Techniques (NM Tripathi 1977)Google Scholar.

15. I discuss this in greater detail in my response to Namita Wahi: Gautam Bhatia, ‘ICLP Book Discussion: Rohit De's “A People's Constitution” – VI: The Author Responds’ (Indian Constitutional Law and Philosophy, 17 Jan 2019) <https://indconlawphil.wordpress.com/2019/01/17/iclp-book-discussion-rohit-des-a-peoples-constitution-vi-the-author-responds/> accessed 18 Dec 2020.

16. For more on pathways of rights, see Baxi, Upendra, ‘Introduction’, in Jois, M Rama (ed), Services under the State (NM Tripathi 1987)Google Scholar.

17. There have been other recent attempts to rethink the canon of constitutional law: see Thiruvengadam, Arun Kumar, The Constitution of India: A Contextual Analysis (Bloomsbury 2019)Google Scholar; Bhatia, Gautam, A Transformative Constitution: A Radical Biography in Nine Acts (HarperCollins Publishers 2019)Google Scholar; Kannabiran, Kalpana, Tools of Justice: Non Discrimination and the Indian Constitution (Routledge 2012)Google Scholar.

18. A People's Constitution also does not focus on land law litigation, which has made up the bulk of litigation in India since the late 18th century and has been the subject of considerable scholarship. It focuses instead on the aspects of the administrative state as it entered new areas of regulation. On land law litigation in the 1950s, see Merillat, HCL, Land and the Constitution in India (Columbia University Press 1970)Google Scholar; Namita Wahi, The Right to Property and Economic Development in India (PhD dissertation, Harvard University 2014).

19. On Dalit constitutionalism, see Kannabiran, Kalpana. ‘A cartography of resistance: The National Federation of Dalit Women’, in Yuval-Davis, Nira, Kannabiran, Kalpana & Vieten, Ulrike (eds), The Situated Politics of Belonging (Sage Publications 2006) 54–74Google Scholar; Yengde, Suraj, Caste Matters (Penguin Books 2019)Google Scholar. On tribals, see Vaidya, Anand, ‘Word Traps and the Drafting of the Indian Forest Rights Act’, in Chandra, Uday & Taghioff, Daniel (eds), Staking Claims: The Politics of Social Movements in Contemporary Rural India (Oxford University Press 2018) 292–316Google Scholar; Priya Ranjan Sahu, ‘The Constitution Set in Stone: Adivasis in Jharkhand are Using An Old Tradition as a Novel Protest’ (Scroll, 14 May 2018) <https://scroll.in/article/878468/the-constitution-set-in> accessed 6 Dec 2020; Nandini Sundar, ‘Pathalgadi is Nothing But Constitutional Messianism, So Why is the BJP Afraid of It’ (The Wire, 15 May 2018) <https://thewire.in/rights/pathalgadi-is-nothing-but-constitutional-messianism-so-why-is-the-bjp-afraid-of-it> accessed 6 Dec 2020. On women, see Kapur, Ratna & Crossman, Brenda, Subversive Sites: Feminist Engagements with the Law in India (Sage Publications 1996)Google Scholar; Kirmani, Nida, ‘Claiming their Space: Muslim Women-led Networks and The Women's Movement in India’ (2009) 11 Journal of International Women's Studies 72Google Scholar. On Muslim groups, see Bhat, Mohsin Alam, Conflict, Integration and Constitutional Culture: Affirmative Action and Muslims in India (JSD dissertation, Yale Law School 2017)Google Scholar.

20. Sathe, SP, Judicial Activism in India (Oxford University Press 2002)Google Scholar; Baxi, Upendra, Courage, Craft and Contention: The Indian Supreme Court in the Eighties (NM Tripathi 1986)Google Scholar.

21. Bhuwania, Anuj, Courting the People: Public Interest Litigation in Post-Emergency India (Cambridge University Press 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Suresh, Mayur & Narrain, Siddharth (eds), The Shifting Scales of Justice: The Indian Supreme Court in Neo-Liberal India (Orient Blackswan 2014)Google Scholar.

22. De, A People's Constitution, 21.

23. De, A People's Constitution, 141. In dismissing a suit brought by some butchers over the cancellation of municipal licenses as non-representative, the Allahabad High Court examined witnesses and came to the conclusion that there were as many as three hundred families of butchers in Allahabad, stating that it saw ‘no insuperable difficulty in each of the 300 bringing separate suits for damages if the bylaws are found ultra vires’: Haji Ahmad Raza and Others v Municipal Board, Allahabad, AIR 1952 All 711.

24. Baxi, Upendra, ‘“The little done, the vast undone” – Some Reflections on Reading Granville Austin's The Indian Constitution’ (1967) 9 Journal of the Indian Law Institute 348Google Scholar; Chigateri, Shraddha, ‘Negotiating the Sacred Cow: Cow Slaughter and the Regulation of Difference in India’, in Mookherjee, Monica (ed), Democracy, Religious Pluralism and the Liberal Dilemma of Accommodation (Springer 2011) 137–159Google Scholar; Khurshid, Salman, At Home in India: A Restatement of Indian Muslims (Vikas Publishing House 1986)Google Scholar.

25. Lala Hardev Sahai, ‘Sarvocha Nyayalaya ka nirnay godhan ko katal se naheen bacha sakta: Pashu visheshagyon ka safal shadyantra [Supreme Court Decision could not save cows from slaughter: Animal expert's conspiracy successful]’, Purushottam Das Tandon Papers, File 277 (National Archives of India).

26. Writ Petitions No 15 of 1959, No 14 of 1960, and No 21 of 1959 (Supreme Court of India). The court held that fixing the age of slaughter at 25, when an average cow lived until 15, was a mala fide attempt to evade the prohibition on absolute bans.

27. De, Rohit, ‘Cows and Constitutionalism’ (2019) 53 Modern Asian Studies 240, 274CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28. State of Gujarat v Mirzapur Moti Kureshi Kassab Jamat 2005 8 SCC 534.

29. Rohit De & Surabhi Ranganathan, ‘We are Witnessing the Rediscovery of India's Republic’ New York Times (27 Dec 2019) <https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/27/opinion/india-constitution-protests.html> accessed 18 Dec 2020.