{"id":30948,"date":"2018-10-27T11:33:34","date_gmt":"2018-10-27T06:03:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.forumias.com\/?p=30948"},"modified":"2018-10-27T11:33:34","modified_gmt":"2018-10-27T06:03:34","slug":"the-1947-singularity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/the-1947-singularity\/","title":{"rendered":"The 1947 singularity"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.thehindu.com\/opinion\/lead\/the-1947-singularity\/article22870618.ece\"><b>The 1947 singularity<\/b><\/a><\/p>\n<p><b>Context:<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In the debates on India\u2019s contemporary history, the meaning and significance of 1947 and of the framing of the Constitution have always been contested.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><b>Arguments contested:<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Did the Constitution mark a moment of discontinuity with the colonial past, and a desire to transform Indian political and social structures?<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Was it simply a transfer of political power and a change of rulers, leaving underlying institutional arrangements intact?<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><b>Constitution as an \u201cincremental development\u201d of what existed:<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><b>Two-thirds of the Constitution replicates<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> the 1935 Government of India Act.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Key enablers of colonial executive dominance such as the <\/span><b>ordinance-making power and Emergency powers are still carried over.<\/b><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Constitution expressly <\/span><b>endorsed existing colonial laws.<\/b><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The <\/span><b>laws of sedition, blasphemy and criminal defamation, Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, and far-reaching Emergency powers<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> are based on similar logic: <\/span><b>the colonial imperative of reducing citizens to subjects and placing their liberties at the mercy of centralised and unaccountable power.<\/b><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Central to this argument is the <\/span><b>issue of suffrage (the right to vote in political elections).<\/b><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It is argued that in the <\/span><b>thirty years before Independence, there had been a slow and incremental development of representative institutions in India.<\/b><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><b>Constitution as a \u201crevolutionary\u201d in the true sense:<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It has also been argued that the imagination and implementation of universal suffrage was <\/span><b>not in any sense a \u201ccontinuation\u201d, or simply an \u201cincremental development\u201d of what existed before.<\/b><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Rather, it was revolutionary in the true sense of the word, <\/span><b>a re-imagination of the social contract and the basic principles that underlay it.<\/b><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In at least four distinct ways, universal suffrage in independent India marked a decisive break from its colonial past.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><b>First, arithmetically:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> the franchise granted by the British regime in the 1919 and 1935 Government of India Acts was highly restricted, and at the highest (in 1935) no more than 10% of Indians could vote.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><b>Second, structurally:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> voting in British India took place under the regime of separate electorates, divided along class and economic lines.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><b>Third, the character of the electorate: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">voting entitlements were based on property and formal literacy-based qualifications, which reproduced existing social and economic hierarchies, and excluded the very people whose interests were most in need of \u201crepresentation\u201d.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><b>And fourth, voting was a gift of the colonial government, <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">which could be granted or taken away at its will.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Suffrage was a privilege accorded to a few Indians, and not a right that all Indians had to decide who would govern them.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><b>Conclusion:<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In early 2017, in a very significant judgment involving the executive\u2019s ordinance-making powers, the Supreme Court<\/span><b> expressly departed from colonial precedents on the subject, and placed important limits upon the scope of presidential ordinances. <\/b><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Thus,<\/span> <span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">the court has an opportunity to affirm the words of one of its greatest civil rights judges, Justice Vivian Bose, who recognised the <\/span><b>deeply transformative character of the Constitution.<\/b><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The 1947 singularity Context: In the debates on India\u2019s contemporary history, the meaning and significance of 1947 and of the framing of the Constitution have always been contested. Arguments contested: Did the Constitution mark a moment of discontinuity with the colonial past, and a desire to transform Indian political and social structures? Was it simply&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/the-1947-singularity\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The 1947 singularity<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":61,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[555],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30948","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-test-1","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","views":{"total":0,"cached_at":"","cached_date":1704895753},"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30948","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/61"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30948"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30948\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30948"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30948"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forumias.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30948"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}