M.K. Nambyar Chair | Talk on ‘Constitutionalism as the Language of Politics in India: Fraternity as the Key to Democracy’

The MK Nambyar Chair on Constitutional Law is pleased to announce that Dr. Shaunna Rodrigues, Core Lecturer in Contemporary Civilization at Columbia University’s Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, will be delivering a lecture based on her paper titled ‘Constitutionalism as the Language of Politics in India: Fraternity as the Key to Democracy.’ The lecture is scheduled for 19th December from 3:50 pm-5:00 pm.

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Abstract of the Paper

Across elite and popular sites of democratic constitutionalism’s moment of creation in India, democracy was viewed as a mode of participation in shaping common laws, norms, and the life of a political community. However, there was also an understanding that this practice of democracy could progress in a postcolonial democracy like India if and when its diverse participants actively knew one another.

Political thinkers like B.R. Ambedkar and Abul Kalam Azad captured this principle of knowing others in order to enable greater participation in democracy through the concept of fraternity. In addition to identifying communication and association as valuable tools for building fraternity in India, they also systematically reflected on the moral and ethical frameworks needed in Indian public life to enable the deepening of knowledge of others in Indian democracy. These moral and ethical frameworks did not operate through secular conceptions of toleration. Instead, they employed non-secular yet plural frameworks, driven by a reconstruction of Buddhist and Islamic conceptions of fraternity, which emphasized identifying one’s own good in the good of others by sharing in and understanding the vital processes of their lives.

This paper outlines how their ideas of fraternity contribute to both elite and popular interpretations of constitutionalism as democracy unfolds in India to justify why knowledge of one another enables greater participation, and thus progress, in postcolonial Indian democracy. Further, it compares their conception of fraternity to Hindutva’s conceptions of the political community to assess the effectiveness of the former as a democratic counter to the latter’s majoritarianism in constitutionalism’s current moment of crisis in India. Finally, it assesses if and how overlaps and divergences between epistemically different non-secular conceptions of fraternity have implications for a pluralist conception of democracy in India.

About the Speaker

Dr. Shaunna Rodrigues is a Core Lecturer at the Core Curriculum in Contemporary Civilization, and the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University, New York. She is a political theorist who uses historical methods to study how anticolonial ideas shape constitutionalism and the trajectories of democracy in postcolonial societies. She is currently working on her upcoming book, Anticolonial Constitutionalism: Fraternity, Progress, and Self-Respect in Indian Democracy. She has a BA in Economics from St.Stephens College, New Delhi, an M.A. in Political Studies from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies from Columbia University, New York.

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