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Pratap Bhanu Mehta What Is Constitutional Morality
Pratap Bhanu Mehta What Is Constitutional Morality
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615 Pratap Bhanu Mehta, What is constitutional morality http://www.india-seminar.com/2010/615/615_pratap_bhanu_mehta.htm
There was a second usage that Ambedkar was more familiar with from
its 19th century provenance. In this view, constitutional morality refers
to the conventions and protocols that govern decision-making where the
constitution vests discretionary power or is silent.
But Grote’s use of the term was different from these two uses, and more
important for Ambedkar’s purposes. Ambedkar was making a series of
historical claims about constitutionalism. Like Grote, he had little doubt
that constitutional morality was rare. It was not a ‘natural sentiment’.
The purpose of Grote’s History of Greece had been, in part, to rescue
Athenian democracy from the condescension of its elitist critics like
Plato and Thucydides, and argue that Athenian democracy had, even if
briefly, achieved elements of a genuine constitutional morality.
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615 Pratap Bhanu Mehta, What is constitutional morality http://www.india-seminar.com/2010/615/615_pratap_bhanu_mehta.htm
But there are still several good reasons to unpack the references to
constitutional morality. First, we simply need to complicate our
understanding of how our framers understood the Constitution.
Formalism of a certain kind was central to their imagination of the
Constitution as a mode of association. Second, it is a striking fact that
while Ambedkar recognized the contradictions between the actual
injustice and constitutional aspirations, he did not collapse the
Constitution into a doctrine of distributive justice. Implicit in his
invocation of the contradiction is a dual-track conception of justice.
There is constitutional justice, defined by certain rights and procedures.
There is also substantive justice, embodied in debates over private
property and the rival claims of socialism versus capitalism.
On the other hand, we might feel that there is something unstable about
the political psychology associated with this dissociation of
constitutional from distributive justice. Can citizens really be committed
to a framework that allows both goals at once: the rights of the billion-
dollar home owner and a commitment to redistribution? In almost all
his speeches, Ambedkar himself wrestles with this tension: Can a
constitution survive without a singular conception of distributive justice
underlying it?
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The greatness of each one of them consists not just in the distinctive
points of view they brought together, but their extraordinary ability to
work together despite so many differences. Congress itself facilitated
the entry of so many people with an anti-Congress past into key roles in
the Assembly. It takes a willful historical amnesia to forget the fact that
the men and women of the Assembly worked with an extraordinary
consciousness that they needed and completed each other. The
historiography of the Constituent Assembly has not regarded it as an
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Footnotes:
1. For easy access to the two Ambedkar speeches referred to in this text, see the
selection, The Constitution and the Constituent Assembly Debates. Lok Sabha
Secretariat, Delhi, 1990, pp. 107-131 and pp. 171-183.
The quotation from Grote that Ambedkar uses can be found in a reissue of George
Grote, A History of Greece. Routledge, London, 2000, p. 93.
3. Ibid., p. 174.
4. Ibid., p. 181.
5. Ibid., p. 181.
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