Sovereignty Before Law

[with Moiz Tundawala]

Book review: Violent Fraternity: Indian Political Thought in the Global Age, by Shruti Kapila, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2021, 328 pp., $37.00/£30.00, ISBN 9780691195223

Excerpt:

The Indian Constitution of 1950 was authored in the shadow of a bloody partition which left at least a million people dead and another fifteen million displaced in what was the largest mass migration in human history. Yet, it is hardly surprising that there is no reckoning with partition in this fundamental charter of rights and governance since all modern constitutions are grounded in sovereign violence which they then seek to repress and sublate within some form of legal and national consensus. Constitutions, after all, are future-oriented in their scope and ambition. Regardless of whether these documents are revolutionary or constitutionalist in emphasis, they at least claim to inaugurate a new beginning by breaking away from the past. Constitution writing in India followed a long period of anti-colonial resistance, but distinct from concretising or curtailing a revolutionary success story, the postcolonial national ideology channelised it to usher in a social revolution.