Bhatia - The Indian Constituent Assembly : deliberations on democracy

UDIT BHATIA

ARVIND ELANGOVAN

SANDIPTO DASGUPTA

VATSAL NARESH

NEERA CHANDHOKE

GAUTAM BHATIA

ARUDRA BURRA

SHABNUM TEJANI

KALYANI RAMNATH

MANJEET RAMGOTRA

Gautam Bhatia is a practising lawyer and legal academic based in New Delhi, India. He specialises in Indian constitutional law. He graduated from the National Law School of India University, Bengaluru, India; read for the BCL and LLM degrees at the University of Oxford, UK, and Yale Law School, USA, respectively; and has taught as a visiting faculty member at the National Law School of India University and the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences. His articles have appeared in the Oxford Handbook for the Indian Constitution, The Australian Journal of Legal Philosophy, The Asian Journal of Comparative Law, Global Constitutionalism, and Constellations, and some are forthcoming. He is the author of Offend, Shock, or Disturb: Free Speech under the Indian Constitution (2015).

Arudra Burra is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India. He has a Doctorate in Philosophy from the Princeton University, USA, and a Juris Doctor from the Yale Law School, USA. His research interests explore different facets of the liberal tradition: the concepts of coercion, deception and consent, and their role in legal and moral argument; the continuity of law and legal institutions across changes of political regime and the nature of civil liberties, particularly freedom of speech.

Neera Chandhoke is former Professor of Political Science, University of Delhi, India. She is the author of Democracy and Revolutionary Politics (2015), Contested Secessions: Democracy, Rights, Self-Determination and Kashmir (2012) and The Conceits of Civil Society (2003) among others.

Sandipto Dasgupta is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Ashoka University, New Delhi, India. He is currently writing a book on the history and theory of the making of the Indian Constitution.

Arvind Elangovan teaches History at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, USA. He is interested in political and constitutional histories of nineteenth- and twentieth-century India and is currently working on his book on Sir B. N. Rau and the making of the Indian Constitution.

Vatsal Naresh is a graduate student in Political Science at Yale University, USA. He also has degrees in History and Political Science from St. Stephens College, University of Delhi, India, and Columbia University, USA. His research focuses on the areas of democratic institutions, political realism and constitution making. Before joining Yale University, he was graduate researcher at the Center for Democracy, Toleration, and Religion, New York, USA.

Manjeet Ramgotra is Senior Teaching Fellow in Political Theory at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, UK. Her work examines republicanism in the history of ideas. She has published articles on The Conservative Roots of Republicanism, Republic and Empire in Montesquieus Spirit of the Laws, on Rousseau and on diversifying the political theory curriculum. Presently, she is working on a project that considers why predominant Western understandings of republicanism elide postcolonial articulations and experiences of republicanism as well as a book on hierarchy and empire in the republican theories of Cicero, Machiavelli and Montesquieu.

Kalyani Ramnath is a doctoral researcher in History at Princeton University, USA. She graduated from the National Law School of India University, India, and Yale Law School, USA, with degrees in law. Between 2010 and 2012, she was a faculty member at the National Law School of India University teaching legal and constitutional history. While this continues to be her primary research interest, she is also involved in projects on comparative constitutional law and writes about histories of criminal procedure in India and Sri Lanka.

Shabnum Tejani is Senior Lecturer in the History of Modern South Asia at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, UK. She is the author of Indian Secularism: A Social and Intellectual History, 18901950 (2012). Her work has been published in South Asia Research, Journal of Colonialism and History, and Economic and Political Weekly.

I am grateful to Jon Elster, Rohit De, and David Owen for emphasising the wide range of methodological perspectives from which Constitutionmaking can be approached. At Oxford, Liz Frazer, Tarun Khaitan, Jinal Dadiya, Sanya Samtani and Bruno Leipold have been terrific sources of learning on constitutions and democracy. I am also grateful to Rochana Bajpai, Humeira Iqtidar, Leigh Jenco and other members of the Comparative Political Theory Group in London. Harshavardan Raghunandhan, Utsarjana Mutsuddi and Ayesha Sheth gave valuable research assistance for this volume. I am also indebted to Aakash Chakrabarty at Routledge, who has been extremely helpful as this project developed. Essays by Kalyani Ramnath and Shabnum Tejani were previously published by