the indian constitution granville austin

Consensus-building, therefore, becomes an important way in which majority support for a decision can be secured. However, if one were to think of India as a sum of various linguistic groups or castes then it would be difficult to divide the population into majority-minority. If one were to think of the Indian people in purely religious terms one could say the Hindus constitute the majority, while the Muslims, Sikhs, Jains, Christians and other denominations are all minorities. Narasimha Rao developed in his famous presidential address to the Tirupati session of the All India Congress Committee (AICC) in 1992 and linked it to the Buddha’s concept of the Middle Path.Īt least one sociological and political reason why India’s wise Constitution makers eschewed the idea of majority vote and opted for consensus and accommodation would have been the fact that Indian society and polity are marked by such diversity that even the notion of a majority is fluid. It is this notion of ‘third way’ that Prime Minister P.V.

Accommodation was neither this nor that but a ‘third way’, defined in varying shades of grey. Compromise is 50:50, black plus white in equal proportion. Similarly, the principle of accommodation was not just one of seeking a compromise but was based on the ability to reconcile and harmonise. The principle of decision-making by consensus rather than majority vote, Austin suggested, was India’s contribution to modern politics and democratic governance. Austin clarified that ‘accommodation’ was not to be confused with ‘compromise’. In his authoritative treatise on the Indian Constitution, The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation, Granville Austin made the interesting point that the entire process of the drafting of the Constitution was marked by two features distinctive to an Indian style of politics - consensus and accommodation.

The indian constitution granville austin