Uday S. Mehta

"Constitutional Politics and the Dilemma of History"

Abstract:

The paper asks the following question: How do political constitutions configure the relationship between the past of a country and its imagined future? The question has a special poignance in post-colonial contexts precisely because the justification of empire typically rested on the claim that such societies were "incased" in their history, and for that reason not present in contemporary time. Not surprisingly political independence is thus often marked by frenzied attempts at rejecting history. It is with the political, psychological and normative implications of this insistent attempt to be freed from history that this paper is concerned. Its primary focus will be on the Indian experience. In the Indian Constitution (1950) there is a vivid and self-conscious sense that India's future as a progressive republic rested on the constitution's ability and success in sequestering India's past from its present and its future. Such attempts to quarantine the past are an endemic and familiar feature of political modernity. They are also fraught with psychological and political consequences; indeed many of the salient features of contemporary Indian politics can be seen as a response to a conception of political independence that was braided with the rejection of history.