As the beacon of political freedom in modern India, the Indian Constitution has held out the promise of secular liberal values for all its citizens. In turn, this vision has animated a constitutional aspiration to define the Indian people as a community of individual citizens, free from the parochial divisions that historically plagued the constitutional horizon of the preceding colonial state. However, drawing on my recently published book ‘India’s Communal Constitution: Law, Religion and the Making of a People’, I will try to demonstrate in this essay a long-standing and less examined tendency that stands alongside the Constitution’s liberal promise, but which identifies the Indian people in religious and communal terms. This inherent inclination, subtly yet powerfully, shapes how we, the people of India, are understood and drawn into constitutional practice.
As a counter-intuitive argument that goes against the grain of conventional wisdom, I make my case by drawing on the making of political identity in modern India, as it has influenced aspects of our constitutional common sense. Thus, I begin with the suggestion that the Constitution, as well as its practice, does not only disclose a monolithic liberal project, but is instead a field of contestation. Here, the aspiration of individual citizenship is presented against a powerful antagonist: the inclination to view Indians as embodiments of religious communities. This is not merely a powerful social force, like the rise of Hindu nationalism, influencing from the outside, as it were, the workings of constitutional institutions. Instead, the communal Constitution points to a structural orientation internal to the Constitution’s design and practice, deeply embedded amidst its liberal commitments. To all those who value these liberal commitments, the communal constitution might even be termed a “pathological expression of constituent power”, where the sovereign authority of the Indian ‘people’ is articulated in national, communal, and parochial terms, rather than solely as a collective of free and equal citizens.
