ABSTRACT
The relationship between democracy and the people’s sovereignty in twentieth century India has roots in the temporal structure of the British colonial state. At the heart of colonial sovereignty lay a framing of the ‘rule of law’ predicated on the distinction between a modern, ‘rationalising’ procedural realm, associated with the state, and a ‘traditional’ substantive realm, associated with a society defined largely by premodern cultural and religious ‘tradition’. Challenges to the colonial state’s claims to sovereign authority were directed most forcefully at breaking this temporal distinction between state and society, in significant part by mobilising new temporal images of India’s ‘people’. But nationalist images of the ‘people’ continued to be marked by competing temporalities, particularly between contrasting Gandhian and socialist images of the ‘people’. Unresolved tensions between the temporal frames underlying these images marked the structure of the new Indian constitution and erupted in the bitter conflicts leading up to Indira Gandhi’s Emergency. This in turn produced new temporal visions of the constitution itself in the 1970s and 1980s, reflected in the Supreme Court’s ‘basic structure’ doctrine, which have continued to play out in the decades since.
