Rohit De and Ornit Shani reconstruct India's Constitution making as a participatory process

Rohit De and Ornit Shani describe in their book Assembling India's Constitution how the creation of the Indian Constitution involved a wide range of social and institutional actors beyond the elite Constituent Assembly of India.

The authors argue that constitution-making was a dispersed field of political activity where diverse groups translated their demands into a shared language of rights and representation.

The book shows how tribal groups in North-East India, such as the Garo, drafted their own constitutions to propose federal structures and land protections. Similarly, rulers in Princely States, which were large territories in India, experimented with alternative constitutions to prepare for representative governance. The Shahpura State Constitution Act of 1947 is one example of a document that sought to guarantee fundamental rights for citizens.

Other actors like the Madras Legislative Assembly protested their exclusion from the process, while bureaucrats and military officials worked to protect the authority of the state. Ordinary citizens and religious associations also sent petitions and proposals to the assembly. De and Shani note that while these diverse inputs gave the Constitution of India legitimacy, the process still favored claims based on legal expertise and administrative feasibility.

The authors conclude that constitutionalism functioned as a language of politics that organized and stabilized claims from a diverse population. This framework allowed certain political demands to become intelligible to the new state while marginalizing others. The book encourages future study of the archives surrounding these various constitutional visions to understand how the legal structure of India was reconstructed after the end of British rule.