The Nation’s Armature

As the Indian constitution turned 70 on January 26, 2020, hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens gathered in streets across the country protesting the new citizenship law, through collective recitations of the preamble to the constitution. Since its promuglation, social and political movements had made claims using particular provisions of the constitution; artists and writers around the freedom of speech, political parties challenging preventive detention, people’s movements around the right to food or education, regional movements for local autonomy; what set this moment apart was the unprecedented engagement with the preamble itself.

Aakash Singh Rathore’s book is prescient in its hope that it will “spark a renewed passion for the preamble”. Ambedkar’s Preamble is a cross between a scintillating detective thriller, a necessary companion to Amebdkar’s life and thought and a sharply focused glimpse into the intellectual foundations of the Indian republic. The first half of the book is a whodunit. Rathore asks who wrote the preamble to the Indian constitution and assembles a cast of likely suspects: Jawaharlal Nehru through his objectives resolution; B.N. Rau, the learned advisor to the constituent assembly; the collective efforts of the seven-member drafting committee and the sole authorship of Ambedkar himself. Through a forensic comparison of drafts, skilful reconstruction of committee meetings and drawing on the conceptual history of the vocabulary of the preamble, Rathore makes a persuasive case for Ambedkar’s authorship.

The fixing of authorship is not mere hagiography but significant in rebutting both casteist accounts that seek to minimise Ambedkar’s role in the drafting, as well as critical narratives that draw on Ambedkar’s speeches in the 1953 disclaiming authorship (“Much of what I had to do was against my will”) to suggest that the commitment to this particular constitution needs to be rethought. As Rathore argues, the preamble, far more than the individual provisions themselves, “articulates the principles that precondition the possibility for our unity as a nation”.

The first half of the book establishes Ambedkar’s authorship through procedural evidence, while the second asserts that the conceptual content came from Ambedkar’s intellectual thought, and goes on to excavate how the six preambular concepts (justice, liberty, equality, dignity, fraternity and the nation) are rooted and to be understood through Ambedkar’s revolutionary thought. The six chapters that follow are heterogeneous in method and sources, drawing eclectically from Western philosophy, Indian history, Ambedkar’s biography and the writings of Ambedkar and his contemporaries. Some persuade more than others, though all serve as signposts to explore Ambedkar’s life and thought. In Liberty, Rathore’s method sparkles as he traces how the freedom clauses in the various draft preambles were whittled down to “thought, expression, belief, faith and worship” and freedom itself was replaced with liberty. This juxtaposition is not superficial, as Rathore walks us through Ambedkar’s critique of popular conceptions of freedom as political independence or self rule (Swaraj) which could easily replace domination by British with domination by caste Hindus. As Ambedkar once quipped, rather than Swaraj, “Annihilation of untouchability is my birthright”. Nationalism was for Ambedkar a means to an end, and it’s “worth to be determined by the nature of the society it constructed”. It’s not surprising that a passive concept of freedom and its association with Gandhian Swaraj was redrafted byAmbedkar through an active concept of liberty.

Equally significant is Fraternity, a clause whose inclusion was widely attributed to Ambedkar in the Constituent Assembly itself. Rathore shows the centrality of fraternity in Ambedkar’s conception of democracy, as sustaining both equality and liberty. Radically, Rathore argues that Ambedkar’s penned in “blood, ink and tears”, what is now described as a Rawlsian conception of justice and “public reason”, a decade before Rawls grappled with the question inside a university classroom. Ambedkar’s fraternity is wider than the slogan of the French Revolution, it is immersed in social experience and engagement with Buddhist thought, allowing him to overcome his public frustrations with the Constitution in 1955 by articulating fraternity as “maitri, fellowship with all living beings”.

Perhaps most significant for the current times is the last chapter on Nation, a term that was absent in all of Ambedkar’s early drafts of the preamble but replete within the archives of the nationalist movement. The final clause would read, “Fraternity, assuring the dignity of the individual and the unity of the nation”, allowing Ambedkar to tie nationalism to promoting fellowship and belonging. As Rathore says, true national pride is not romanticism about past glories, but a future of fellowship where “the state enforces the dignity of each individual” through constitutional morality and the violation of dignity alarms “public conscience”.

Ambedkar’s Preamble offers revisionist and original arguments that should be read and widely engaged with. It builds innovatively upon primary texts but is puzzlingly thin in its engagement with other works on Ambedkar, be it Anupama Raoon on rights and political subjectivity, Shailaja Paik on gender and education, Faisal Devji on the minority question, Sharmila Rege on caste and gendered violence, Sukhdeo Thorat on economic ideas--the absences are numerous even among the scholarship in English, let alone the rich writing in Marathi. Given the significance of Rathore’s claims, the non-engagement is a lost opportunity for the author and the readers. For instance, Ambedkar’s two decades of engagement with labour and trade unions is reduced to a page of description, and his demand for ‘Not Bread but Honour’ is read simply as emphasising caste over class, or noting that Ambedkar tried to find common cause with the left. But the originality of his economic thought, the centrality of caste to economic life, his legislation on labour, his plans for land redistribution or work on developmental projects is neglected.

Why do we search for authors? For Rathore, the case for Ambedkar’s preamble challenges the idea of the constitution-making as a transactional process, where interest groups concede one idea for another, or are persuaded by the desire for office. The Constitution was long presented as a product of a happy consensus. By centering Ambedkar’s agency, Rathore offers a coherent conceptual economy where justice, liberty, equality and the nation are fundamentally transformed with fraternity and dignity that undergird the republic, rather than a collection of compromises. It reminds us that as the question changes, other authors and intimate histories become visible--Arvind Elangovan’s focus on B.N. Rau offers another way to think of constitutionalism outside non-nationalist frames, Shauna Rodrigues turns to Maualana Azad to show the Islamic justifications for the Indian Constitution, Pooja Parmar centres Jaipal Munda’s poignant challenge to adivasi exclusion, Aditya Nigam shows how the violence of the Partition cast transformed the terms within the assembly. As more Indians gather behind the Constitution as a framework for public life, one looks forward to greater engagement with both Ambedkar and other secret histories.

(Rohit De is an associate professor of History at Yale University and author of A People’s Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic.)