ABSTRACT

The 1950 Constitution of India is an outcome of an ideational battle that began long before it was formally framed by the members of the Constituent Assembly in little less than three years between 1946 and 1949. Tracing its intellectual genealogy to the philosophy of Enlightenment, this chapter shows that the Constitution heavily drew upon the liberal values of constitutionalism which flourished in India in the wake of colonial rule. Three major ideological forces seem to have been critical in the making of the Constitution: colonialism, nationalism and democracy. The Constitution of India had both colonial and nationalist imprints. By devising mechanisms of sharing power with their Indian counterparts, the colonial rulers set in motion processes of constitutionalizing India which drew their inspiration from the fundamental ethos of British Enlightenment. There were concerted efforts by the alien state, in other words, to conceptualize constitutional governance within the theoretical framework of liberalism.