Legalizing the Revolution: India and Constitutionalism in the Twentieth Century

<strong>CENTRE FOR THE STUDY OF LAW AND GOVERNANCE Jawaharlal Nehru University</strong> SEMINAR SERIES <strong>Sandipto Dasgupta</strong> Newton International Fellow of the Royal Society and the British Academy King's College, London on <strong>Legalizing the Revolution: India and Constitutionalism in the Twentieth Century</strong> <strong>Abstract :</strong> The talk will present the broad outlines of a distinct theory of constitutionalism in the twentieth century through a study of the Indian constitutional experience. The main tenets of constitutional theory have been primarily informed by the constellation of ideas produced through the democratic revolutions of the late eighteenth century. Constitutions were understood as bringing revolutions to an end, institutionalizing new social and political orders. By the twentieth century, the major shifts in the nature of both the state and the society produced a very different set of challenges for constitution makers. Demands were made on the state for intervention and transformation of an increasingly complex social world, and relatedly in the juridical sphere, administrative law emerged to challenge the primacy of constitutional law in organizing political power. India – where these new challenges were central to the project of framing a constitution – provides a paradigmatic setting for analysing the life of constitutionalism in this much-transformed terrain. The result of the process gives a distinct vision of what a constitution can and should do. Rather than formalizing the end of a revolution, in India the Constitution became the mode of mediating the necessary transformative changes in social and economic conditions. It also required bringing together the disparate languages of constitutional and administrative law within a single juridical architecture, creating a new idiom of public law. However this is not a triumphalist presentation of Indian constitution as an idealized model. The talk would also sketch out the inherent contradictions of this new project as it manifests itself through juridical developments and constitutional crises, and hence asking the larger theoretical question as to whether it is at all possible to legalize the revolution. <strong>Friday, 16 January 2015</strong> <strong>About the Speaker: </strong>Sandipto Dasgupta is a Newton International Fellow of the Royal Society and the British Academy, at King's College, London. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University, before which he received his law degree from the National Law School of India. Sandipto is currently completing a book manuscript that reconstructs a distinct theory of constitutionalism in the 20th century.