THE CONTEXT
In the previous two weeks, we examined the anchoring question for the unit, 'What is India?', from standpoints of the personal and the local. With regard to the first You shared with the class an image of the place you consider home; you came up with another image that 'captures' the essence of India as you understand it. In order to make sense of India from the second perspective, you worked with your peers in groups for the Neighbourhood Observation Project.
This week, however, we will approach the same generative question--'What is India?'--from yet another viewpoint, one that is impersonal and abstract standpoint. In that, moving on from the personal and the local registers, we will now seek to define India in political terms, i.e., the nation-state of India as a political community, founded on a binding socio-legal compact with its citizens. In other words, instead of dwelling on 'what India is according to me', we will now invert the subject and the object, and enquire into 'what I am according to India'. And, for provisionally defining India under this aspect, we will turn to the founding document that frames the relationship between the nation-state and its citizenry, between India and Indians—the Constitution of India.
Our engagement with the political idea of India this week will enable us to:
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Obtain a basic conceptual understanding of 'politics' and the 'political' in the context of a nation-state.
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Comprehend the basic framework of political belonging with respect to a nation-state, as configured in the idea of citizenship and being a citizen, particularly in the case of India.
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Appreciate the enshrined privileges of being a citizen and the precarity that ensues when citizenship is jeopardized.
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PREPARING FOR THE WEEK
Dwelling on the political idea of India in the will require you to have familiarity with certain key concepts. Not only is a basic understanding of these concepts necessary to facilitate your engagement with the assigned readings, viewings, and class discussions this week, it is useful know what these terms mean in the world beyond the classroom. For they come up constantly, in all kinds of situations, related to the affairs of the country.
KEY CONCEPTS:
The three key concepts anchoring this week's topic are: (a) politics; (b) citizen and subject; and (c) Constitution and constitutionalism.
READINGS:
Besides these key concepts, there are three readings: One is a short extract from a book on the Constitution of India by lawyer and legal scholar, Gautam Bhatia. This reading places the making of the Constitution in its historical context and notes the ways in which it embodies a vision that sought radically transform Indian society by ridding it of its fundamental inequalities. The second reading is a news article the compares the Indian Constitution to that of other countries from various angles using data and numbers. With useful graphs and charts, it presents some really interesting observations regarding our Constitution in comparison to other countries' with respect to its length, scope, freedom it affords to the government and citizens, and so on. And last, but definitely not the least, we will together read and discuss parts from the Constitution of India, specifically the Preamble and Parts I, II, and III, pertaining to citizenship and fundamental rights, respectively. We will be using the latest edition of the text (November 2021) that is updated to include the most recent amendments to the Constitution.
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KEY CONCEPT #1:
POLITICS
Applied to a variety of contexts, POLITICS, and its adjectival form, political, are ideas that are difficult to pin down exactly. On the one hand, in everyday language, we use the term to signal the manipulation of power for self-interest--conniving and conspiratorial in nature--over greater good. In this sense, politics is a 'dirty' game that is best avoided. We should keep from politicizing things, we are often told. This view of politics was captured well by Ernest Benn, a British publisher from the mid-20th century, when he wrote: "Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies." But, at the same time, we are also keenly aware that politics is an indispensable, inescapable part of our lives. Especially that part of our lives which is connected to others nationally and internationally--our public lives as citizens and subjects. Indeed, we know that political structures, processes, and their outcomes have massive real-world consequences for the well-being of vast numbers of people. They can do immense harm and immense good.
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The common-sense understanding of 'politics' typically locates and associates it with contestations around State power and its offices, with the legislative and the ministerial arms of the State as its most visible and preeminent sites. Accordingly, the most commonly recognized political process, especially in modern democracies such as ours, are State-conducted elections, whereby every individual meeting certain constitutionally mandated criteria--usually of citizenship and age--can potentially make a political choice by casting a vote. Indeed, right to suffrage and exercise of franchise are often regarded as the very essence of citizenship and the highest responsibility of an individual as a citizen in a democratic polity.
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There is, however, another sense of politics, a more expansive and generalized one, that we ought to bear in mind. Understood thus, politics is any event and/or process that involves collective decision-making/action/contestation, within a field of power, with the well-being of a given community as its objective, even if 'well-being' and 'community' are often understood in starkly different ways. In this conception, politics has a wide field of play and is not restricted to the formal sphere of the State. Viewed thus, it becomes apparent almost every aspect of our social and cultural lives are also political. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say, for example, that the air we breathe is political; or, the water we drink is political. For what is determined to be 'clean air' and 'clean water' is a result of deliberation and contestation, conflict and cooperation, involving governmental agencies and actors/organizations working on behalf of communities or a mobilized community itself. Hence, though the domain of and processes related to access and control of State-power dominates our understanding of politics, it is useful, even necessary, to widen the scope of politics and think of it in the manner outlined above. For, it brings into view the operation of power and contestation that inform and regulate the lives of common people.
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KEY CONCEPT #2:
CITIZEN & SUBJECT
Simply put, a citizen is an individual who is endowed with certain political, legal, and civil rights and responsibilities within the territorial boundaries of a sovereign nation-state or, as we ordinarily call it, a 'country'. These rights stop to obtain formally and are significantly abridged beyond the territorial borders of the country or a set of countries (in those cases where dual/multiple citizenship is allowed) of which one is a citizen. On the other hand, within a country, the same rights do not extend to non-citizens. The citizen, therefore, is an individual member of a political community that is unique to each separate nation-state, its 'people'. It is in recognition of this political community being the foundation of a nation-state's existence as such that most national Constitutions in the in world today begin with "We, the people of [country X],...". And, it is in this foundational text where the legal framework for the rights-bearing citizen, of who can be one a citizen in the first place, is typically laid out.
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The fullness of the idea of citizenship, of being a citizen, in the contemporary world is often enshrined in the individual's right to participate in political processes and institutions of a given country, especially in elections. As a citizen, one is also formally guaranteed equal protection of the laws of the land, equal weightage of one's vote, equal access to the state's resources, and equal recognition by the state of one's cultural heritage. Indeed, people of a country might be hierarchically located within structures of caste, class, religion, gender, region, so on and so forth. But, as citizens, everyone is equal. Formally--by the letter of the law--at least.
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In the context of any country, there are different categories of and pathways to citizenship. In legal theory, these are: jus sangunis, that is citizenship secured by bloodline and descent; jus soli--citizenship secured by birth within the territory of a nation-state; jus matromonii--citizenship acquired through marriage with a citizen of that country; and, jus nexi, that is citizenship secured by the intention and application to become the member of the political community of a given county. The last two citizenship pathways are better known as naturalization--a legal channel and process through which interested parties, who are not citizens by the first two categories, obtain the citizenship of a particular country. Different countries have different rules that govern citizenship under each of the aforementioned categories. And these rules are not static; they change over time based on (a mix of) historical reckoning, political ideologies and the social outlook of government of a given country.
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Who or what, then, is a SUBJECT? Like the citizen, the subject also implicates a certain relationship between an individual and the state. In fact, if you think about it, you will realize that you have come across the term often--in the context of empires, kingly power, and other feudal arrangements. For examples, present day Indians, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis were all subjects of the British Empire, and as such, they subject to colonial rule--its laws, institutions, and policies--in which they had, until towards its end, no active role in making. As this suggests, qualitatively different from citizens, subjects are passive recipients of the laws that govern them and play no active role in deciding the framework of the political processes and institutions that constitute the government. Contrasting the citizen and the subject at its extreme end, Rajeev Bhargava, a well-known political theorist, says:
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“Unlike citizens, subjects have none of these rights. Political participation is simply out of the question — subjects cannot vote, deliberate on public issues, complain, criticise, or stand for public office. They have no claims on the state — not even to the basic right to life. If they get food, shelter or any other personal benefit, it is entirely on the goodwill of the state. Conquered people, the colonised, slaves, all those who live under laws made by others and designed to oppress them, are obvious examples. Subjects live in states meant for others. States, for them, are not political communities but a source of oppressive power. They are located within but do not belong to states. Nor do they identify with them. Subjects are bereft of civic friendship. All they have is a nameless, non-political relationship with other subjects.”
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The democratic and republican revolutions in the western world that began in the late-18th century with the American and French Revolutions, are usually marked as having ushered in the era of the modern nation-state and the citizen--the rights-bearing individual who is a member territorially-bound political community--leaving the subject in the dustbowl of history. But in reality and practice, the subject still casts a long shadow on the citizen. As we know, wars and other political upheavals leave multitudes across the world 'stateless', as refugees--without the unalienable political, legal, and civil rights that an individual is theoretically guaranteed as a citizen of a given nation-state. 'Theoretically'--because, we know that the promise of unconditional equality that undergirds the idea of modern citizenship is seldom fulfilled in reality even under normal circumstances. We know, in practice, nation-states and their governments do not treat all their citizens as equal, that not every individual has the same opportunity and means to actualize the rights bestowed on her as a citizen, that entire social groups are marginalized from political processes, from accessing the state's resources, and so on. In other words, though a majority of the nation-states that constitute the world today geopolitically are republican and democratic, the ideals of citizenship constantly jostle with the realities of subjecthood for large numbers of people. In other words, as Bhargava also notes, in actuality, the citizen and the subject are not binary, mutually exclusive concepts. Rather, they exist on a continuum.
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KEY CONCEPT #3:
CONSTITUTIONALISM
The CONSTITUTION of a nation-state is a compendium of the foundational and fundamental principles that at the minimum defines and limits sovereign power; outlines the rights of the individual citizen and obligations of the state to its citizenry; and demarcates the separation and devolution of state-power into different branches and levels of government. CONSTITUTIONALISM is the ideology which, as the legal historian, Rohit De, puts it, "...is based on the desirability of the rule of law rather than the arbitrary rule of men[.]” In other words, by putting forth the framework which limits the powers of the state and defines the specific arrangement of state-power (in the form of the Constitution), constitutionalism seeks to prevent the possibility whereby a single person can become all-powerful--the lawmaker and the lawgiver, the judge and jury, all rolled into one person--and, thereby, exerting unlimited power over other peoples' lives, without any accountability.
Typically, a new Constitution comes about when a foundational, qualitative change in the political order occurs. Such a change could be the transition from monarchy to republican government (as in the case of Nepal, for example), or from dictatorship to democracy and vice versa (Pakistan, for example), or colonial dependency to independent sovereignty (as in the case of India). In a democratic order, a new Constitution is typically drafted by a body called the Constituent Assembly, whose members are directly or indirectly elected to the position, which other can be nominated to it. So, for example, of the 389 members that comprised the Constituent Assembly of India in December 1946, 296 were indirectly elected to it by legislators from different regions of British India, while 93 members were nominated to it by the erstwhile Princely States. This body produced what is the longest codified Constitution in the world today. Indeed, not only is the Constitution of India the longest of its kind, it is also the longest surviving original Constitution of all post-colonial countries.
Click on the image to watch the first episode of Samvidhaan, a tele-serial on the making of the Indian Constitution
SOME TAKEAWAYS And
Questions
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While the question of belonging to a country is often experienced and expressed in terms of affective and emotional attachment, such as love and loyalty, it is important to recognize that in a world geopolitically carved out into territorially defined nation-states, national 'belonging', more consequentially, a political and legal question, grounded in the idea of citizenship, whose framework is constitutionally defined.
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Who, under what conditions, can be a citizen; what rights a citizen possesses; the obligations of citizenship, etc., differ from country to country. The Indian Constitution defines these in a certain way. These definitions, frameworks, and their scope, have not been static, however. Since the adoption of Constitution in 1950, it has been amended, new citizenship laws have been framed, and these laws--both constitutional and statutory--have been interpreted differently by courts at different points in time. We will come back to this in the last unit.
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How do the ideals in the constitution stand up to the reality around us? Or in other words, to what extent does the constitution reflect Indian reality? Are all citizens equal - in both a formal sense and a more substantive one? Reading the news can you think of examples of how the constitution intersects with the everyday life of ordinary people?