Suchergebnisse

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Contents -- Introduction -- Chapter 1 Western Classical Models -- Chapter 2 The Historical Nexus -- Chapter 3 A Troubled Ambedkar -- Chapter 4 The Assembly Debates -- Congress and the Plums of Office -- A Cautious Nehru -- An Unsurmountable Procedure -- Mock Assembly -- Ambedkar's Dilemma -- No Time for Dissent -- Communal Passions and Westminster -- Voices in the Wilderness -- Chapter 5 The Indian President and None to Bind The Future Generations -- Index -- About the Author.

How do we understand the 15th amendment of the Bangladeshi Constitution that restored the principle of secularism and simultaneously (re)inscribed certain populations as outside the cultural nation? I approach this question through a close reading of the Constituent Assembly debates of 1972. The precarious state of minorities, I contend, is not a symptom of an incomplete or failed secularism but a feature of the violence inherent to the nation-state form. The Bangladeshi example suggests not only that minority is a profoundly unstable category but that some minorities are visibly critical to national self-fashioning while others must be invisibilized as national others. (Asian Aff/GIGA)

The debate over 'Differences' and 'Disadvantage' in the Constituent Assembly which has shaped the mainstream political discourse on the abrogation of the preferential treatment policies for the religious minorities represents the de facto narrative of their restriction to the Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs). This article shatters this de facto narrative to arrive at an actual one and argues that reservation in the public employment for the religious minorities was not abrogated because they were considered socially and economically less backward than SCs and STs but was abrogated in a surreptitious manner; a manner which did not take cognisance of the nationalist deliberations in the Constituent Assembly and the debate over the 'Differences' and 'Disadvantage', with no particular reflective influence of these deliberations and debates upon the form which the preferential treatment policies in India were to finally assume. The article establishes this disconnect between the deliberations of the Constituent Assembly and the form the preferential treatment policies finally assume in India.

The Indian Constituent Assembly Debates is a remarkable deliberative document to create the written constitution of the democratic republic of India based on an open society. By its very nature the text is polyphonic and had multifarious voices with a dominant and uniting trend to create a liberal constitutional state with Indian features suited to Indian conditions. The intention, and rightfully so, was not to bring about a "revolution" in the nature of a Russian, Chinese or even the French variant, soon slipping into dictatorships of either party or bureaucratic elites or charismatic individuals; but was to create a democratic polity based on liberal constitutional values drawing from India's history and cultural conditions. This rich text running into few thousand pages is being explored in some of its aspects in the present work. Though, the tone and tenor of the present work is not representing the dominant voice of a soprano but that of a countertenor who is castrated to reach the higher octave.

The debate on citizenship in the Constituent Assembly was overshadowed by the partition of India, which created difficulties in making constitutional provision for citizenship on certain defined criteria. However, it was quite clear to most of the members of the Constituent Assembly that the criteria of citizenship could not be fixed beforehand, as it was not possible to anticipate future developments. Thus, the Constitution empowered the parliament to define citizenship from time to time in the light of changing conditions. Thus began the process of enactments revising the provisions for citizenship, which ultimately culminated into the violation of the Constitution through enactment.

This article outlines the conceptual foundation of India's free speech regime by focusing on the debates of the Constituent Assembly (1946–1949), and traces the development of the Article 19 of the constitution, which guarantees all citizens the right to free speech and expression, albeit certain 'reasonable restrictions'. While offering a synoptic account of the conservative side of its development—as framers negotiated the discrepancies between their imagined ideal and the existing, often-conflicting reality—the idea here is not to uncover some grand master plan of Indian democracy from which it has faltered, but to explore ways in which it might lend a fissure to violent outbursts of 'hurt sentiments' in contemporary India, which impinges upon the idea and enjoyment of free speech in general, and freedom of artists in particular.