Author: Madhav Khosla
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674980875
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 241
Get Book Here
Book Description
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.
Author: Bimal Prasad
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Constitutional history
Languages : en
Pages : 282
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Rohit De
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691210381
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308
Get Book Here
Book Description
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.
Author: Jack N. Rakove
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307434516
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 465
Get Book Here
Book Description
From abortion to same-sex marriage, today's most urgent political debates will hinge on this two-part question: What did the United States Constitution originally mean and who now understands its meaning best? Rakove chronicles the Constitution from inception to ratification and, in doing so, traces its complex weave of ideology and interest, showing how this document has meant different things at different times to different groups of Americans.
Author: Leila Seth
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 8184752539
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 64
Get Book Here
Book Description
We, the children of India— Former Chief Justice Leila Seth makes the words of the Preamble to the Constitution understandable to even the youngest reader. What is a democratic republic, why are we secular, what is sovereignty? Believing that it is never too early for young people to learn about the Constitution, she tackles these concepts and explains them in a manner everyone can grasp and enjoy. Accompanied by numerous photographs, captivating and inspiring illustrations by acclaimed illustrator Bindia Thapar, and delightful bits of trivia, We, the Children of India is essential reading for every young citizen.
Author: Aishwary Kumar
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 080479426X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 416
Get Book Here
Book Description
B.R. Ambedkar, the architect of India's constitution, and M.K. Gandhi, the Indian nationalist, two figures whose thought and legacies have most strongly shaped the contours of Indian democracy, are typically considered antagonists who held irreconcilable views on empire, politics, and society. As such, they are rarely studied together. This book reassesses their complex relationship, focusing on their shared commitment to equality and justice, which for them was inseparable from anticolonial struggles for sovereignty. Both men inherited the concept of equality from Western humanism, but their ideas mark a radical turn in humanist conceptions of politics. This study recovers the philosophical foundations of their thought in Indian and Western traditions, religious and secular alike. Attending to moments of difficulty in their conceptions of justice and their languages of nonviolence, it probes the nature of risk that radical democracy's desire for inclusion opens within modern political thought. In excavating Ambedkar and Gandhi's intellectual kinship, Radical Equality allows them to shed light on each other, even as it places them within a global constellation of moral and political visions. The story of their struggle against inequality, violence, and empire thus transcends national boundaries and unfolds within a universal history of citizenship and dissent.
Author: Alan Gledhill
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 309
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Sudha Pai
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 981191544X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 291
Get Book Here
Book Description
The book presents debates around the concept of representation and how these ideas apply to representation for selected disadvantaged groups in India. It discusses empirical concerns and examines political representation of these disadvantaged groups in post-independence India. The experience of political representation of SCs, STs: the method of election, role of political parties in providing representation, role played by these groups in parliamentary institutions, and the extent of their participation. A second, significant area the volume attempts to cover is representation of the Muslim minority in parliament and state assemblies and understanding the reasons for their under-representation since independence, and more particularly in recent years.
Author: Sunil Khilnani
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780374525910
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292
Get Book Here
Book Description
"In his new introduction, Khilnani addresses these issues in the new perspectives afforded by events of the recent year in India and in the world."--BOOK JACKET.
Author: A.V. Dicey
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 134917968X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 729
Get Book Here
Book Description
A starting point for the study of the English Constitution and comparative constitutional law, The Law of the Constitution elucidates the guiding principles of the modern constitution of England: the legislative sovereignty of Parliament, the rule of law, and the binding force of unwritten conventions.
