Minorities in Postcolonial India: Revisiting the Constitutional Debates of the Long 1940s

Currently, we have a rich interdisciplinary literature on the nature, evolution, and the challenges that minorities of different kinds - from the religious to the personal - face in postcolonial India. Quite understandably, a significant number of interventions in the literature pivot around the promises made in the Indian constitution that guarantees freedom to individuals and groups to pursue the life and identity of their choice. However, in identifying the constitution as a point of departure, the document itself is decontextualized to such an extent that it is often seen as a normative force that somehow escaped historical compulsions. Indeed, the constitution is viewed as a document that went against the grain of history itself in some ways. In revisiting the constitutional debates of the long 1940s (starting in the early 1930s to early 1950s), I advance two propositions: firstly, the 'minority' question (at least religious) as it were dominated and indeed propelled constitutional conversations during these years and thereby becoming a central force in determining the political nature of a future postcolonial India. Secondly, in the aftermath of partition and decolonization, the centrality of minorities to the national question receded quite rapidly. I trace this descension of minorities not simply in the majoritarian politics of the time but in the very imagination of constitutionalism that sought to protect the rights of minorities. In doing so, I suggest that ironically, marginalization of minorities accompanied the process of constitution framing even as the constitution genuinely remained committed to the protection of minorities in postcolonial India.