MAKING OF CONSTITUTION

All of this is true of the Indian case, where the nationalist movement, legislative
documents like the 1935 Government of India Act, the Cabinet Mission
Statement of 1946, along with towering personalities like Ambedkar and Nehru,
decisively shaped the content of the final Constitution. As living documents,
constitutions, perhaps more than any other instrument of the State, are in a
constant process of producing their own ongoing textual references, closely
associated with other constitutional and legislative antecedents.

The Constitution prescribes for the nation its primary mode of existence, and in
doing so folds it into a narrative in which its distinctiveness is qualified, not
least because its many untidy edges are fit into a stipulated mould. It bears
repetition that the project of the nation, which notwithstanding the euphoria of
‘Independence’, in many ways was to constitute a ‘we, the people’, under
conditions where that national identity was still deeply contested, is for the
Constitution, already taken as a settled fact. In the case of the Indian
constitutional founding this was doubly the case. Not only was the Constituent
Assembly authorised by an existing government, the interim government, along
with the Cabinet Mission statement of May 1946, but also the deliberations on
the future Constitution were significantly constrained by the Government of

India Act of 1935.9 Nehru’s declamation at the head of this chapter conveys a
sense in which that destiny was chosen, but also already prescribed.