The long making of India’s Constitution: Letters from the past

At independence, India tried to frame a constitution for a sovereign union, wherein all power and authority would be derived from the people. This had to be achieved in the midst of the partition of India and Pakistan that was tearing apart the people and the territory, while more than 550 sovereign princely states had yet to be integrated into India; and it had to take into account people who were profoundly diverse, largely illiterate, and poor. By any standard of democratic theory, India was expected to fail, and its democracy certainly did not seem likely to endure. India succeeded at establishing a democracy based on a constitution that Indians wrote for themselves. It is the longest living constitution in the postcolonial world. However, scholars of democracy have largely ignored the Indian case in their efforts to theorize transitions to democracy and democratization. Literature often refers to India as an anomaly or an exception. This has begun to change over the last decade.1