Did the people have a say in the making of the Constitution?

A new book, based on archival research, offers an original take on the framing of the Constitution as a participatory process

- Gautam Bhatia

In 2020, I was part of a constitutional challenge to the government’s plans to “redevelop” the Central Vista in New Delhi. One of the arguments that we made was that these plans had been formulated—and were now proposed to be implemented—without any public participation.

Public participation was a fundamental constitutional value, not just in India, but across the world, where it was increasingly coming to be understood that the relationship between the people and their government was not simply limited to the periodic casting of the vote; rather, democratic accountability required the continuing participation of the people in decisions that impacted them. The redevelopment of the nation’s primary democratic symbol—we argued—was certainly a decision that fell within such a category.

In choosing to uphold the government's redevelopment plan, the Supreme Court observed that the founders of the Indian Constitution had chosen a model of “representative democracy” rather than “direct democracy”: that is, one where the people delegated the task of governance to their representatives with the only constitutionally mandated form of accountability coming through the cycle of elections. This is what—the court said—distinguished the Indian Constitution from its counterparts in South Africa and Kenya, which did explicitly enshrine public participation rights when it came to lawmaking and executive action.

I have no reason to believe that a better argument would necessarily have changed the court’s decision. However, if Rohit De and Ornit Shani's book, Assembling India’s Constitution, had been published at the time, we would have definitely had a stronger argument, and a stronger critique of the court’s eventual dismissal of the right to public participation as a constitutional value.