Examining the Making of the Constitution

At the dawn of independence, the liberal traditions that underpin a constitutional democracy were absent in India. How did the framers of the Constitution deal with this challenge? A few months after the anti-Citizenship Amendment Act and human rights activists demonstrated with a copy of the Constitution of India in their hands, it is important to return to the making of the text that Madhav Khosla calls “India’s founding moment”. The book cites the 1946-1949 Constituent Assembly debates at length in order to answer one question: how did the founding fathers of the world’s largest democracy “approach[ed] the missing foundations on which self-government was widely thought to be predicated?” (p. 3).