Abstract
India’s Preamble is traditionally perceived as an admixture of the first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s famous ‘Objectives Resolution’ and the constitutional advisor B. N. Rau’s Draft Constitution. It has been examined for its content and form under various academic and legal writings produced since its legal birth on 26 January 1950. Aakash Singh Rathore’s Ambedkar’s Preamble: A Secret History of the Constitution of India is the latest addition, nay challenge, to this corpus of literature.
The objective of the book—to borrow from its blurb—is to establish Dr Ambedkar’s ‘irrefutable’ authorship of the Preamble. This is proposed to be achieved by unravelling a particular ‘secret’ of the constitution making process which, Rathore claims, is deep embedded in the accusations of ‘lack of transparency’ levied against the Drafting Committee headed by Dr Ambedkar (p. xii). Reading in between these charges, the author brings the reader’s attention to the Preamble’s ‘scarcely investigated date of birth’ (p. xviii) and highlights that against popular conception the actual blueprint of the Preamble is a lesser known draft proposal, which ‘came out of the blue’ from Dr Ambedkar’s pocket during a meeting of the Drafting Committee on 6 February 1948 (p. xliv). The claim is then given substance in the chapters that follow which isolate and analyse the six characteristic ‘preambular’ (p. xlviii) concepts—Justice, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity and its two sub-terms dignity and nation—to tease out ‘the Preamble’s gene’ (p. xxi).
Chapter 1 begins with a discussion of the ‘Justice clause’ and the nature of its tripartite formulation—‘social, economic and political’—incorporated in the Preamble (p. 4). Noting the lexical order of this phrase, it is asserted by the author that despite being a hand-picked word from Nehru’s ‘Objectives Resolution’ and making frequent appearances in Gandhi’s philosophical writings, the essence of the justice clause is still Dr Ambedkar’s as it reflects its most meaningful and ‘concrete embodiment’ in his life and thought (p. 28). This is validated ‘not by tracing the conceptual history of the term within his lifetime of writings and speeches’ (p. 9) but by using a brief biographical sketch of the ‘epoch’ in Dr Ambedkar’s life, marked from 26 January 1930 to 26 January 1950 (p. 10).
Chapter 2 deals with the ‘Liberty clause’ to reveal that though the two preceding drafts—Nehru’s ‘Objectives Resolution’ and Dr Ambedkar’s own proposed preamble—had consciously employed the concept of ‘freedom’, the Preamble’s final draft had this term substituted for its more politically, and less metaphysically, oriented synonym ‘liberty’. This transformation was a result of Dr Ambedkar’s dissatisfaction with Gandhi’s ‘spiritualization of freedom’ through its ‘ineluctable association with Swaraj’ (p. 36) during the national movement. To continue with such an ideologically laden notion freedom, which was also being usurped by the exclusivist majoritarian Hindu nationalists, would have led, to the conviction of Dr Ambedkar, in Dalits remaining predominantly ‘included out’ of Swaraj’s fold (p. 42).
Chapter 3 analyses the ‘equality’ clause’ using Dr Ambedkar’s unfinished series of books titled Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Ancient India. Against the Marxist or Hegelian logic, it is argued that the conceptual roots of Preamble’s ‘equality’ are rather grounded in Dr Ambedkar’s peculiar conception of Indian history, which is envisioned as the ‘the slow and torturous… emergence of equality’ of gender and caste in India (p. 88). Recording the rise and fall of the egalitarian revolution (Buddhism) and the inegalitarian counter-revolution (restoration of Brahmanical order), Ambedkar’s Constitution, with its equality clause, becomes within this narrative the next egalitarian revolution initiated against ‘graded inequality’ (p. 63) and ‘Brahmanical patriarchy’ (p. 65).
Chapter 4 discusses ‘fraternity’. It reveals that not only is the term’s precedence exclusively founded in Dr Ambedkar’s proposed draft preamble of 6 February 1948 but also in substance the clause parallels the evolution of Ambedkar’s thinking. Fraternity, as part of the French revolution, had a predominant political significance in Ambedkar’s ‘pre-Preamble’ (p. 98) view owing to its ability to solve the ‘incommensurability problem’ between the democratic principles of liberty and equality (p. 103). But with the growing influence of Buddhist philosophy on Dr Ambedkar ‘post-preamble’ (p. 98), the term also metamorphosed theologically to encapsulate a more sentient and humanitarian meaning of ‘love, justice and goodwill’ (p. 103), reflected in the Buddhist notion of metta (or Maitri in Sanskrit). For Dr Ambedkar, this ‘indigenous’ notion of fraternity (p. 98) could better resolve the overlapping contradiction between India’s democratic institutions and its undemocratic social milieu as it reflected a form of constitutional morality at the level of democratic institutions, and at the ‘purely social level’ it manifested public conscience (p. 110).
Chapter 5 focuses on the word ‘dignity’ within the fraternity clause. The author once again brings to attention the fact that all ‘source documents’, except Dr Ambedkar’s draft preamble of 6 February 1948, stand ‘absolutely silent’ on the term’s usage (p. 119). Rathore factors this exception by arguing that owing to his lived experiences, Dr Ambedkar understood that dignity was inevitably linked with caste in India. The phrase ‘dignity of individual’ was hence coined to vividly mark the Constitution’s rejection of the pervasive Brahmanical idea of ‘graded dignity’ in favour of the theological doctrine of sacredness of the person, the Kantian principle of treating individuals with equal moral worth, and its secularized version manifested in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Chapter 6 finally brings the reader to a discussion of the last phase ‘unity of nation’ which forms the latter part of the fraternity clause. Interestingly, it is revealed that unlike the previous terms, the idea of ‘nation’ remained absent from Ambedkar’s draft preamble of 6 February 1948 and was only ‘concessionally included’ in the Preamble’s later draft (p. 151). The author claims that it is precisely this eventual inclusion of the term which reveals the dominance of Dr Ambedkar’s influence in the making of the Preamble given the characteristic position which the word came to occupy—within the fraternity clause, behind ‘dignity of individual’ and fused with the idea of ‘unity’.
With this chapter-wise assessment of the ‘descriptive part’ (p. 175) of the Preamble, the author reasserts why it is Dr Ambedkar who must be ‘distinctively’ and ‘authoritatively’ (p. 177) credited for the authorship of the Preamble. For one, each clause held a specific meaning for him, finding parallels in his lived experiences. More significantly, Dr Ambedkar shifted ‘the centre of gravity’ of the ‘pre-existing terms’ such as justice, liberty, equality and nation, by incorporating ‘the unprecedented terms’ of ‘fraternity’ and ‘dignity’, and birthed an ‘entirely new conceptual economy’ among and between these preambular concepts, bringing forth the underlying ideological commitment and the transformative nature of the Indian Constitution more strikingly (p. 176).
In sum, Rathore’s book holds relevance for academic and legal scholars alike. However, it does run the risk of appearing more speculative than required, particularly when the availability of archival sources on the minutes of the Draft Committee meetings are, to the author’s own admission, limited and even incomplete (p. xiii). Further, readers familiar with the author’s previous works or his specific writing style may find certain sections repetitive. Yet the book must be credited for its valuable archival and ideological additions to the existing body of literature on Ambedkar’s life and thought, and his relative contributions in the Constitution-making process. The book’s underlying theme is clearly making a normative case for ‘what should be’ understood as the essence of India’s Preamble. In this spirited effort, the author does well to engage the readers more deeply with the idea of ‘Dalit Swaraj’ held so dearly by both Dr Ambedkar and Rathore.