“The historiography of Indian nationalism has for a long time been dominated by elitism -colonialist elitism and bourgeois nationalist elitism…Both these varieties of elitism share the prejudice that the making of the Indian nation and the development of the consciousness -nationalism - which informed this process were exclusively and predominantly elite achievement.”
Ranjit Guha, ‘On Some Aspects of Historiography of Colonial India’
THE ELITIST HISTORIOGRAPHY of Indian nationalism has, within itself, several erasures and omissions. These erasures are also evident in our constitutional history,where the elite protagonists and their liberal achievement in the form of the Constitution obscure several difficult questions pertaining to subaltern minority groups, such as religious minorities, disabled and queer people.
A critical approach to the Constitution has predominantly focused on reading it from a liberal democratic framework. The exclusion of minorities from the Constitution has, therefore, been seen as an inevitable but rectifiable failure emanating from state policies and not as a failure of the Constitution itself. Here, we argue that the Constitution has been structured in a way that it excludes minority voices, which are considered ‘deviant’ from the ‘mainstream society’. There were alternative imaginations that failed to find a place in the document.
In the ‘un-historical historiography’ that valorizes elite Indian nationalist figures as the heralds of the nationalist movement, there is an erasure of subaltern classes and their role in the independence struggle, as well as of their attempts to become meaning-makers in the constitutional discourse.
Two epistemic provocations served as our trigger for interrogating this question. The first, Prof. G. Mohan Gopal’s provocation - the ‘Brahminical fiction about the Constitution’ - wherein he asserts that the dominant authors of constitutional discourse in India are Brahmins, and the second, an equally forceful epistemic provocation by Prof. Saroj Giri, who suggests that ‘Indian Constitution displaced radical possibilities.’
We take these provocations in a democratic spirit and attempt to interrogate the discontents of religious minorities, sexual subalterns and embodied minorities such as the disabled regarding the Constitution.
The Indian Constitution and the exclusion of minority aspirations
Mathew John argues that the quest for Indian independence was more about disproving the British idea that India would be too deeply divided to be a modern liberal state, rather than contesting or challenging the inherently flawed ideas. The dominant voice at the time, the Indian National Congress, did not contest this linkage of constitutional identity to nationhood and worked towards the realisation of a nation that the British denied, even when the majority of the country disagreed with the coloniser casting itself as a pedagogue, stewarding people to eventual nationhood.
The result of this artificial colonial monitored exercise was the suppression of several minority voices by a liberal constitutional framework – what Mathew John calls the screening of “autochthonous epistemologies”. While India established a ‘nation’, it failed to address the contending centres of social power. Mohammad Shahbuddin interestingly points out that the liberal ideology of a post-colonial state does not align with the need to protect or uphold the minority groups and it assumes that the principles of equality and non-discrimination are sufficient safeguards. Liberal postcolonial states have seen ethnic aspirations of minority groups as impediments to becoming a ‘normal’ Westphalian state that must be in tandem with a national, liberal, and developmental state. This exclusion of minority aspirations brings an inherent Hindu epistemic privilege in the oeuvre of the constitution.
In his book, India’s Communal Constitution, Mathew John delves into the communal orientation of the Indian Constitution and the drag it exerts on its liberal goals. The work differs from a mainstream approach by arguing that the subjugation of Islamic identities is not a result of government policies but a deep-rooted structural flaw of the Indian Constitution. He, thus, shifts the focus away from viewing the Constitution as an inherent progressive document and highlights that the very design of the Constitution is communal in nature.
India thus grapples with strong contradictions since the liberal democracy it adopted is not an all-encompassing ideology. It is rather characterised by exclusions of those alternative imaginations. One indication of the structural bias became evident at the time of the Constitution’s drafting. The formation of the new Indian state was strongly grounded on the idea that it would not be a ‘Hindu counterpart’ of Pakistan. However, the provision for the reservation of seats for religious minorities was retracted from the final draft of the Constitution.
The erasure of sexual subalterns and the disabled
The Indian Constitution, per se, evidently fails to address the concerns of sexual subalterns and persons with disabilities. However, in recent years, it has been suggested that through progressive reading of the Constitution, the Supreme Court of India has been able to reasonably accommodate the LGBTQ+ community and the disabled community. This dominant narrative needs problematization in a democratic spirit.
For queer activists in India, the Naz Foundation (2009) judgment of the Delhi High Court marked a decisive break, signalling the emergence of ‘sexual citizenship’ and opening up the possibility of constitutional belonging for sexual minorities. In reflecting on the case, scholars have highlighted the radical promise of citizenship as a tool to articulate the rights of groups long excluded from legal and social recognition.
At the same time, critical feminist and queer critiques warn that dominant approaches to rights and governance remain rooted in a liberal framework that centres an atomised, self-governing subject. Within this framework, sexuality becomes a site of state regulation, producing a divide between “acceptable” homosexuals who conform to norms of homonationalism and those cast as deviant and excluded from the national imagination. The result is a prescriptive gay subject whose recognition is secured through tolerance rather than justice, accommodating difference without addressing the deeper structures of harm.
Disability jurisprudence, recent scholarship suggests, follows a strikingly similar path. One of us has argued earlier that the Supreme Court’s approach to disability rights is marked less by a commitment to structural equality and more by a liberal politics of accommodation, where access and empathy substitute for a rethinking of ableist power. This logic becomes explicit in the Court’s celebratory invocation of select disabled individuals as the nation’s “shining sons and daughters,” a move that celebrates elevating exceptional achievement as the metric of deserving citizenship. Such rhetoric quietly marginalises those disabled persons who are poor, incarcerated, politically dissenting or are otherwise inconvenient lives that do not fit the inspirational script of resilience and national pride.
Much like tolerated queer citizenship under homonationalism, disabled citizenship emerges here as precarious and modular, shaped by able-nationalist norms and sustained through a deeply paternalistic judiciary that manages difference without unsettling the structures that produce exclusion.
Moreover, the history of Constitution drafting is a history of testimonial erasure of the disabled. In their new book, Assembling India’s Constitution, Rohit De and Ornit Shani highlight the ‘early articulation for constitutional protection’ by the disabled. The Deaf and Dumb society was indignant with the Constitutional disregard towards disability and wrote to the Constituent Assembly for the true realisation of the principle of equal citizenship promised by the Constitution. The Assembly responded that the provision of universal adult franchise would cater to the concerns of the disabled community. This deeply anguished the members of the Society as they were acutely aware that deep rooted exclusion of disabled people is sociogenic, which cannot be cured through bourgeois rights such as ‘one person, one vote’.
Such awareness is in tandem with Prof. Saroj Giri’s critique of universal adult franchise, which argues that it only conveys the impression of equality but adds to majoritarian tendencies.
The exclusion of labouring bodies and their ideology
Finally, one of the less visible but pervasive forms of exclusion by the liberal constitution has been of ideologies of labouring bodies. India, during its independence struggle and post-independence has consistently sidelined ideologies which did not fit into the ‘nationalist framework’. During the independence struggle, the movements from the subaltern classes of Indian society, including the labouring population were not recognised or accepted if they fell outside the strict ideological framework of ‘elite nationalism’, as Ranjit Guha calls it.
For example, in Satara, Maharashtra, around 1942, a demand arose for the establishment of a parallel government or prati sarkar. This was raised by the villagers in Satara who interpreted Mahatma Gandhi’s Quit India movement as a collective struggle against the socio-economic oppression of the colonial power. While this movement was largely successful for a period and mobilised masses, there were undeniable tensions between the movement and the Indian National Congress due to their distinct demand for a parallel government.
Legal scholars Martin Belov and Miroslaw M. Sadowski describe ‘constitutional marginals’ as those who face symbolic stigmatization, marginalization, and degradation produced by exclusionary constitutional imaginaries. The demand of the labouring bodies against alienated lives where their access to resources is severely curtailed, is seen as radical and is similarly stigmatized by the liberal constitutional discourse.
The state, as a ‘comprador bourgeoisie’, consistently ignores these demands and attempts to stigmatize the demands and aligned ideology of labouring bodies. Ashish Nandy rightly pointed out that states, even those proclaiming to be liberal democrats, appreciate controlled dissent.Anything which goes beyond the acceptable limits is deeply criminalised and ostracised.
Taking the Constitution seriously as a political document
This reading against the grain has sought to foreground constitutional discontents not as aberrations, but as structurally produced exclusions embedded within India’s liberal constitutional imagination. By tracing the erasures of religious minorities, sexual subalterns, disabled persons, and labouring bodies, we attempt to problematise the celebratory narrative of constitutional multiculturalism.
Importantly, this intervention is made in a democratic spirit—not to repudiate the Constitution, but to take it seriously as a living political document. A future-oriented reading of the Constitution must therefore move beyond liberal accommodation towards a radical engagement with subaltern epistemologies and marginalized imaginaries. Only through such democratic re-readings can the Constitution begin to address its historical discontents and realize a more substantive, inclusive vision of justice.
