A People's Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic by Rohitde (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018, £38.00, 296 pp.)
| Date | 01 March 2020 |
| Published date | 01 March 2020 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/jols.12216 |
| Author | Shubhankar Dam |
A PEOPLE’S CONSTITUTION: THE EVERYDAY LIFE OF LAW IN THE
INDIAN REPUBLIC by ROHIT DE
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018, £38.00, 296 pp.)
We know a lot about what judges make of the Indian Constitution. We know
a bit about what lawmakers make of the Indian Constitution. But we know
precious little about what the people of India make of the Indian Constitution.
Rohit De’s A People’s Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian
Republic elegantly fills that void. The book is crafted around four stories of
litigation: the journalist who wants his drink; the trader who opposes the heavy
hand of the bureaucrat; butchers keen to sell beef; and the prostitute insistent
on plying her trade. It offers an account of what these Indians made of the
new Constitution and the argumentative arsenal that they employed to recast
their relations with the Indian state. In De’s account, they are proud, confident,
well-resourced citizens demanding constitutional rights, not infantile subjects
begging for beneficence.
Chapter 1 narrates the long arc of prohibition laws in India, prohibition’s
association with Mohandas Gandhi and the Congress Party, and the idiom
of constitutional rights that helped to dismantle it. The Bombay Prohibition
Act 1949 was one of free India’s earliest attempts at prohibition, intended to
create a new kind of moral and productive citizen. The law broke new ground
in criminalizing the possession and consumption of alcohol, in addition to
the usual proscriptions against its manufacture, sale, transport, and so on.
Not long after, Fram Balsara, a Parsi journalist denied access to alcohol,
approached the High Court. He challenged the law’s constitutional validity
and its limited exceptions. De situates the litigant, the lawyers, and the
litigation itself within a broader account of community life in Bombay and
a socio-political debate about state authority and citizenship in the new
republic. He casts his protagonist, Balsara, as a public-spirited crusader: a
little philosopher David valiantly challenging the proverbial Goliath state. As
De repeatedly emphasizes, public benefit, not private gain, motivated him to
commence litigation (p. 48, 53, 63). However, the facts belie this attribution
of generosity. Balsara approached the court because he could not lawfully
procure a drink and possessed the means to seek a writ remedy. That the
litigation acquired a life of its own, was keenly followed and widely reported,
and became a cause célèbre does not diminish the litigant’s personal stake.
Nevertheless, De is right to highlight how constitutional remedies offered
a minority group (the alcohol-trading Parsi community in this instance) an
alternate path to state power and policy making. Balsara won in the High
Court. The state appealed, and the Supreme Court reinstated most of the law.
Still, as De explains, this legal back and forth caused confusion, demanded
repeated legislative amendments, and made implementation a bureaucratic
nightmare. On New Year’s Eve 1963, an exasperated government relented,
liberalizing the issuing of liquor permits (p. 70).
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© 2020 The Author. Journal of Law and Society © 2020 Cardiff UniversityLaw School
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