Gandhi and the Constitution of independent India
Abstract
In 2022, the free and independent India celebrated the seventy-fifth anniversary of its establishment. An important cornerstone of this three-quarter century of sovereignty is the Constitution of India, adopted by the Constituent Assembly on January 26, 1950. This paper attempts to answer the question what the Constitution of India would have been like if it had been drafted by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi himself. I draw the answers to this question from Gandhi’s writings which reveal a considerable amount of the Mahatma’s thinking on issues such as the form of government, administrative models, rights, education and jurisdiction.
References
Agarwal, Shriman Narayan, Gandhian Constitution of Free India. Allahabad, 1946.
Altekar, Anand Sadashi, State and Government in Ancient India. Banaras, 1955.
Ambadkar, Babasaheb Bhimrao Ramji, Writing and Speeches. XVII/1. Dr. B. R. Ambedkar and His Egalitarian Revolution. Struggle for Human Rights. New Delhi, 2003.
Datar, Abhay: The Lucknow Pact of 1916: A Second Look at the Congress-Muslim League Agreement. Economic and Political Weekly 47/10 (2012) 65-69.
De, Rohit, Constitutional Antecedents. In: The Oxford Handbook of the Indian Constitution. Ed. by Choudhry, Sujit-Khosla, Madhav-Mehta, Pratap Bhanu. Oxford, 2016, 86-112. https://doi.org/10.1093/law/9780198704898.003.0002
Gallagher, John, The Decline, Revival and Fall of the British Empire. Cambridge, 1982. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511523847
Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand, Two Posers. In: The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi. LXXXVII. Ahmedabad, 1980, 103-104.
Gándhí, Mohandász Karamcsand, Hind Szvarádzs, avagy az indiai önkormányzat. Ford. Bodor András. A kiadást gondozta Szenkovics Dezső. Kolozsvár, 2010.
Gáthy Vera, India. A múltból a jövő felé. Budapest, 2017.
Kautilya, Arthashastra. Transl. by L. N. Rangarajan. New Delhi, 1992.
Malaviya, Harsh Dev, Village Panchayats in India. New Delhi, 1956.
Manu törvénykönyve. Ford. Borbély Judit. Budapest, 2019.
Nigam, Aditya, A Text Without Author: Locating the Constituent Assembly as Event. In: Politics and Ethics of the Indian Constitution. Ed. by Barghava, Rajeev. New Delhi, 2008, 119-142.
Pant, Apa, An Unusual Raja. Mahatma Gandhi and the Aundh Experiment. Hyderabad, 2014.
Patra, Atul Chandra, Landmarks in the Constitutional History of India. Journal of the Indian Law Institute 5/1 (1963) 81-131.
Ramaswamy, M., Constitutional Developments in India 1600-1955. Stanford Law Review 8/3 (1956) 326-387. https://doi.org/10.2307/1226621
Sorabjee, Soli J., Rights and Human Rights in the Modern World: The Experience of Working the Bill of Rights in the Indian Constitution. In: The Future of Liberal Democracy. Thomas
Jefferson and the Contemporary World. Ed. by Fatton Jr., Robert-Ramazani, Rouhollah K. New York, 2004, 115-122.
Tenigl-Takács László, India története. Budapest, 1997.
Zamora, Mario D., A Historical Summary of Indian Village Autonomy. Asian Studies 3/2 (1965/2) 262-282.