Download or read book The Idea of India written by Sunil Khilnani and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1999-06-04 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In his new introduction, Khilnani addresses these issues in the new perspectives afforded by events of the recent year in India and in the world."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book India s Founding Moment written by Madhav Khosla and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "How did the founders of the most populous democratic nation in the world meet the problem of establishing a democracy after the departure of foreign rule? The justification for British imperial rule had stressed the impossibility of Indian self-government. At the heart of India's founding moment, in which constitution-making and democratization occurred simultaneously, lay the question of how to implement democracy in an environment regarded as unqualified for its existence. India's founders met this challenge in direct terms-the people, they acknowledged, had to be educated to create democratic citizens. But the path to education lay not in being ruled by a superior class of men but rather in the very creation of a self-sustaining politics. Universal suffrage was instituted amidst poverty, illiteracy, social heterogeneity, and centuries of tradition. Under the guidance of B. R. Ambedkar, Indian lawmakers crafted a constitutional system that could respond to the problem of democratization under the most inhospitable of conditions. On January 26, 1950, the Indian constitution-the longest in the world-came into effect. More than half of the world's constitutions have been written in the past three decades. Unlike the constitutional revolutions of the late-eighteenth century, these contemporary revolutions have occurred in countries that are characterized by low levels of economic growth and education; are divided by race, religion, and ethnicity; and have democratized at once, rather than gradually. The Indian founding is a natural reference point for such constitutional moments-when democracy, constitutionalism, and modernity occur simultaneously"--
Download or read book A People s Constitution written by Rohit De and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It has long been contended that the Indian Constitution of 1950, a document in English created by elite consensus, has had little influence on India’s greater population. Drawing upon the previously unexplored records of the Supreme Court of India, A People’s Constitution upends this narrative and shows how the Constitution actually transformed the daily lives of citizens in profound and lasting ways. This remarkable legal process was led by individuals on the margins of society, and Rohit De looks at how drinkers, smugglers, petty vendors, butchers, and prostitutes—all despised minorities—shaped the constitutional culture. The Constitution came alive in the popular imagination so much that ordinary people attributed meaning to its existence, took recourse to it, and argued with it. Focusing on the use of constitutional remedies by citizens against new state regulations seeking to reshape the society and economy, De illustrates how laws and policies were frequently undone or renegotiated from below using the state’s own procedures. De examines four important cases that set legal precedents: a Parsi journalist’s contestation of new alcohol prohibition laws, Marwari petty traders’ challenge to the system of commodity control, Muslim butchers’ petition against cow protection laws, and sex workers’ battle to protect their right to practice prostitution. Exploring how the Indian Constitution of 1950 enfranchised the largest population in the world, A People’s Constitution considers the ways that ordinary citizens produced, through litigation, alternative ethical models of citizenship.
Download or read book India s Living Constitution written by Zoya Hasan and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: India became independent in 1947 and, after nearly three years of debate in the Constituent Assembly, adopted a Constitution that came into effect on 26 January 1950. This Constitution has lasted until the present, with its basic structure unaltered, a remarkable achievement given that the generally accepted prerequisites for democratic stability did not exist, and do not exist even today. Half a century of constitutional democracy is something that political scientists and legal scholars need to analyze and explain. This volume examines the career of constitutional-political ideas (implicitly of Western origin) in the text of the Indian Constitution or implicit within it, as well as in actual political practice in the country over the past half-century.
Download or read book The Idea of Being Indians and the Making of India written by George Varuggheese and published by Partridge Publishing. This book was released on 2013-06-24 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book The Idea of Being Indians and the Making of India is a must read for all Indians. It informs them why India is a colony of its middle class who keeps the 80 percent of the population out of the benefits of all economic planning and development. The answer is that the struggle for Indias freedom was waged by its middle-class leaders only to drive the British out of power and not to get rid of the feudal-fascist governance structures of administration, judiciary, and police, which were crushing us, according to Nehrus admission in his book The Discovery of India. These crushing structures, our leaders themselves took over and had the taste of the power and pelf that flowed, and their feast still continues while the nation gets the human development ranking at 136 among 187 nations, according the latest Human Development Report released by the UNDP in March 2013. The book narrates in lucid language that the noble and highly egalitarian missions of the Indian Republic, contained in the Preamble to the Constitution of India, could not be translated into experiential comforts for people of this country only because they were not compatible with the feudal-fascist revenue-collection-oriented structures inherited from the British. The book argues that when leaders who, after making a set of highly republican and democratically oriented development objectives for their country, adopt them as the Preamble to the Constitution of India instead of creating relevant democratic republican governance structures to implement, they deliberately pick up the regressive feudal-fascist governance structures used by the colonial government for their selfish ends. It is tantamount not only to a political scam but to a spiritual one. The author gives a twelve-point sarvodaya good governance model' as remedy to these strategic errors of our founding fathers and for making a resurgent India with the help of the mission statements of the Indian Republic enshrined in the Preamble to the Constitution of India. The author argues that the mission statements in the Preamble to the Constitution of India contain the idea of being Indians of a healthy, prosperous, and peaceful society at total or 100 percent population level. The making of India of such a society is in the hands of the people of India, especially the youth.
Download or read book The Constitution of India written by Arun K Thiruvengadam and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-12-28 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an overview of the content and functioning of the Indian Constitution, with an emphasis on the broader socio-political context. It focuses on the overarching principles and the main institutions of constitutional governance that the world's longest written constitution inaugurated in 1950. The nine chapters of the book deal with specific aspects of the Indian constitutional tradition as it has evolved across seven decades of India's existence as an independent nation. Beginning with the pre-history of the Constitution and its making, the book moves onto an examination of the structural features and actual operation of the Constitution's principal governance institutions. These include the executive and the parliament, the institutions of federalism and local government, and the judiciary. An unusual feature of Indian constitutionalism that is highlighted here is the role played by technocratic institutions such as the Election Commission, the Comptroller and Auditor General, and a set of new regulatory institutions, most of which were created during the 1990s. A considerable portion of the book evaluates issues relating to constitutional rights, directive principles and the constitutional regulation of multiple forms of identity in India. The important issue of constitutional change in India is approached from an atypical perspective. The book employs a narrative form to describe the twists, turns and challenges confronted across nearly seven decades of the working of the constitutional order. It departs from conventional Indian constitutional scholarship in placing less emphasis on constitutional doctrine (as evolved in judicial decisions delivered by the High Courts and the Supreme Court). Instead, the book turns the spotlight on the political bargains and extra-legal developments that have influenced constitutional evolution. Written in accessible prose that avoids undue legal jargon, the book aims at a general audience that is interested in understanding the complex yet fascinating challenges posed by constitutionalism in India. Its unconventional approach to some classic issues will stimulate the more seasoned student of constitutional law and politics.
Download or read book A New Idea of India written by Harsh Gupta and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book India s Living Constitution written by Zoya Hasan and published by Anthem Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: India became independent in 1947 and, after nearly three years of debate in the Constituent Assembly, adopted a Constitution that came into effect on 26 January 1950. This Constitution has lasted until the present, with its basic structure unaltered, a remarkable achievement given that the generally accepted prerequisites for democratic stability did not exist, and do not exist even today. Half a century of constitutional democracy is something that political scientists and legal scholars need to analyze and explain. This volume examines the career of constitutional-political ideas (implicitly of Western origin) in the text of the Indian Constitution or implicit within it, as well as in actual political practice in the country over the past half-century.
Download or read book India in the Shadows of Empire written by Mithi Mukherjee and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-11-25 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explains the postcolonial Indian polity by presenting an alternative historical narrative of the British Empire in India and India's struggle for independence. It pursues this narrative along two major trajectories. On the one hand, it focuses on the role of imperial judicial institutions and practices in the making of both the British Empire and the anti-colonial movement under the Congress, with the lawyer as political leader. On the other hand, it offers a novel interpretation of Gandhi's non-violent resistance movement as being different from the Congress. It shows that the Gandhian movement, as the most powerful force largely responsible for India's independence, was anchored not in western discourses of political and legislative freedom but rather in Indic traditions of renunciative freedom, with the renouncer as leader. This volume offers a comprehensive and new reinterpretation of the Indian Constitution in the light of this historical narrative. The book contends that the British colonial idea of justice and the Gandhian ethos of resistance have been the two competing and conflicting driving forces that have determined the nature and evolution of the Indian polity after independence.
Download or read book We The Children of India written by Leila Seth and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2011-01-05 with total page 61 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We, the children of India— Former Chief Justice Leila Seth makes the words of the Preamble to the Constitution understandable to even the youngest reader. What is a democratic republic, why are we secular, what is sovereignty? Believing that it is never too early for young people to learn about the Constitution, she tackles these concepts and explains them in a manner everyone can grasp and enjoy. Accompanied by numerous photographs, captivating and inspiring illustrations by acclaimed illustrator Bindia Thapar, and delightful bits of trivia, We, the Children of India is essential reading for every young citizen.
Download or read book India s Founding Moment written by Madhav Khosla and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-04 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Economist Best Book of the Year How India’s Constitution came into being and instituted democracy after independence from British rule. Britain’s justification for colonial rule in India stressed the impossibility of Indian self-government. And the empire did its best to ensure this was the case, impoverishing Indian subjects and doing little to improve their socioeconomic reality. So when independence came, the cultivation of democratic citizenship was a foremost challenge. Madhav Khosla explores the means India’s founders used to foster a democratic ethos. They knew the people would need to learn ways of citizenship, but the path to education did not lie in rule by a superior class of men, as the British insisted. Rather, it rested on the creation of a self-sustaining politics. The makers of the Indian Constitution instituted universal suffrage amid poverty, illiteracy, social heterogeneity, and centuries of tradition. They crafted a constitutional system that could respond to the problem of democratization under the most inhospitable conditions. On January 26, 1950, the Indian Constitution—the longest in the world—came into effect. More than half of the world’s constitutions have been written in the past three decades. Unlike the constitutional revolutions of the late eighteenth century, these contemporary revolutions have occurred in countries characterized by low levels of economic growth and education, where voting populations are deeply divided by race, religion, and ethnicity. And these countries have democratized at once, not gradually. The events and ideas of India’s Founding Moment offer a natural reference point for these nations where democracy and constitutionalism have arrived simultaneously, and they remind us of the promise and challenge of self-rule today.
Download or read book The Constitution and the Idea of India written by Aditya Sondhi and published by Notion Press. This book was released on 2024-01-17 with total page 28 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A constitutional lawyer and scholar holds forth on the Constitution and the idea of India, at a point in time when both are in the throes of being reinvented beyond recognition. Does the Constitution represent an ethos of the people of India that is equitable, emancipatory and evolving? Is it a sturdy foundation for the socio-political bastion of a nation to imagine itself upon? Has it yielded sufficient returns to justify an absolute faith in constitutionalism as a blueprint for an India of the future? Have courts and lawyers stayed true to its sublime promises? The text of this lecture delivered on invitation of the General K S Thimayya Memorial Trust knits together historical, political and institutional underpinnings of the Constitution to argue that this paramount law of the land ought to guide us in our steps ahead as a nation. The lecture draws on threads from Sufi poetry and Persian literature on the one hand, to case law and personal experience on from the practice of law on the other, to build a case for an idea of India that is just, secular and fortified by the highest principles of constitutional morality.
Download or read book Incarnations written by Sunil Khilnani and published by Random House India. This book was released on 2017-01-12 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For all of India’s myths, stories and moral epics, Indian history remains a curiously unpeopled place. In Incarnations, Sunil Khilnani fills that space, recapturing the human dimension of how the world’s largest democracy came to be. His trenchant portraits of emperors, warriors, philosophers, film stars and corporate titans—some famous, some unjustly forgotten—bring feeling, wry humour and uncommon insight to dilemmas that extend from ancient times to our own.
Download or read book The Republic of India written by Alan Gledhill and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Indian Federalism written by Louise Tillin and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-04 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To understand how politics, the economy, and public policy function in the world’s largest democracy, an appreciation of federalism is essential. Bringing to surface the complex dimensions that affect relations between India’s central government and states, this short introduction is the one-stop account to federalism in India. Paying attention to the constitutional, political, and economic factors that shape Centre–state relations, this book stimulates understanding of some of the big dilemmas facing India today. The ability of India’s central government to set the economic agenda or secure implementation of national policies throughout the country depends on the institutions and practices of federalism. Similarly, the ability of India’s states to contribute to national policy making or to define their own policy agendas that speak to local priorities all hinge on questions of federalism. Organised in four chapters, this book introduces readers to one of the key living features of Indian democracy.
Download or read book Politics and Ethics of the Indian Constitution written by Rajeev Bhargava and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2008 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much of the germinal work on the Indian Constitution has been done by legal experts and historians. The distinctiveness of this collection of essays is its focus on the Indian Constitution from the perspective of political theory. Contributors to this volume view the Constitution either as a political or as an ethical document, reflecting configurations of powr and interests or articulating a moral vision. Critically analysing the various aspects of the constitution, the essays discuss equality, freedom, citizenship, minority rights, democracy, rights, property and welfare.
Download or read book The Idea of Being Indians and the Making of India written by George Varuggheese and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2014-03-04 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ABOUT THE BOOK: In 'The Idea of Being Indians and the Making of India, ' author George Varuggheese has attempted what no other author has tried so far in the independent India. The great question that had puzzled millions of Indians was why India is still behaving like the colony that was ruled by the British feudal-fascist government. In this book, the author had tried to answer that question very lucidly and convincingly. And the result? A million dollar scam of a sociological nature, nurtured and sustained by the middle class leaders who acted as the founding fathers of Indian Republic, had come to the surface of Indian history of the past 67 years. With anecdotes from Jawaharlal Nehru's writings, he has established that the Indian middle class leaders who were products of the union between the bad sections of the British middle class and the bad sections of the Indian middle class, had decided that they were capable of taking the control of government from the British personnel and therefore fought for India's freedom from foreign rule. They succeeded in driving the British colonial rulers away and taking over their control systems of police, judiciary and administration for running the Republic of India. Now, where is the scam in all these? Well, In modern vocabulary, a scam stands for a fraudulent act or set of acts involving personal gains of the perpetrators of such acts. When a group of leaders after openly declaring democratic and republican goals for their country in the Preamble to the Constitution of their country, make detailed provisions for continuing with the feudal, oppressive governance systems of their erstwhile colonial masters, that can be called a socio-economic-spiritual scam sculpted on behalf of the Indian middle class against the 80% of the population which was excluded from the development agenda of the country. What is more surprising revelation in this book is the fact that it was Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel who led the majority group of capitalist leaders of the Constituent Assembly of India to draft the Constitutional provisions for retaining the feudal fascist governance structures of the erstwhile colonial government for running the Republic of India. While the Modi government in Gujarat had decided to erect a 600-ft statue of Sardar Patel in reverence to the heroics he had shown in uniting the small princely states of pre-independent India and named the statue as Statue of Unity, author Varuggheese had denounced Modi's effort as statue in remembrance of the feudal-fascist mind set of Indian middle class. Though Nehru opposed the feudal-fascist governance structures of the British colonial government, he could not do anything to prevent Patel from having his way, as Nehru's socialist group consisted of only a minority. Author Varuggheese gives a 12-point sarvodaya good governance model in the book based on the Mission Statements of the Indian Republic as given in the Preamble to the Constitution of India to recover the lost chances of Indian Republic at the hands of the founding fathers. It is for the first time that an author has tried to present the Preamble to the Constitution of India as the Mission Statements of the Republic of India. He also feels that the new political party emerged in India, i.e. the Aam Aadmi Party led by Arvind Kejriwal and Yogendra Yadav will be able to redeem India from the feudal-fascist governance structures foisted on the Republic of India by the founding fathers of India as their party is driven by the ideology of 'swaraj' or the rule by people. In fact, he is sure that the Aam Aadmi Party leaders will be called the makers of a new India, as India is all set to walk the path of 'swaraj. The Idea of Being Indians and the Making of India is a book meant for every Indian home or those who cares for India.
