THE Indian Constitution establishes political unity in a widely divided society. The Constituent Assembly members envisioned a State capable of liberating the population from the shackles of legacies of injustice. In the 19th century, Alexis de Tocqueville and John Stuart Mill apprised us about the difficulty of democracy in certain societies in the absence of some background condition. Sudipta Kaviraj has argued that the democratic credentials of our Constitution, the lexicon of which is borrowed from the West, improvised itself in the everyday life of Indian polity.
This constitutes a pedagogical issue that the State, the courts and citizens continuously encounter in independent India. Unlike the West, the concentration of power was never limited to the State. Hierarchies of power were maintained by self-regulating communities, creating a system of “layered sovereignty”. India’s founding moments, that culminated in the framing of the Constitution, also put into motion the liberation from political servitude and the conditions for self-determination against layered oppressive structures.
