Abstract
While the examination of the ‘background conditions’ to ideas that emerged in the Constituent Assembly has become a necessary paradigm for studies on Indian constitutionalism, little attention has been paid to religious justification as an important background condition to the formation of constitutional essentials in India. This chapter questions this secular bias in scholarship on Indian constitutionalism and argues that religious justifications played an important role in shaping the plural political conception contained in the Indian constitution. In particular, it studies the construction and endorsement of constitutional principles by Maulana Abul Kalam Azad. It argues that Azad developed a framework laying out the form and concepts of a justificatory discourse that adherents of Islam could endorse and employ in shaping a political conception for the future Constitution of India. By exploring his formulation of concepts of tawhīd, jihād and democratic equality, this paper elaborates the discursive strategies that Azad used to align political pluralism with Islamic ideals as they historically developed in South Asia. The paper concludes with a short reflection on why Azad’s justification of constitutionalism in India has not retained its discursive power over time.
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Notes
- 1.
In using the term right to Islamic justification, this paper uses and develops Rainer Forst’s framework for a right to justification within the contemporary Indian context. See Rainer Forst. (2014) The Right to Justification: Elements for a Constructivist Theory of Justice, (New York: Columbia University Press).
- 2.
This can be seen in the several cases which use Article 25 (a) and Article 25 (2) (b) of the Constitution of India to structure religion into a core set of essential beliefs. See Ronojoy Sen (2009) “The Indian Supreme Court and the Quest for a “rational” Hinduism”, South Asian History and Culture, 1:1, 86–104.
- 3.
Few within the discourse on constitutionalism in India have noticed and pointed out this rationalizing and homogenizing approach towards religion by the law. For an exceptional analysis of this see Mathew John (2019) ‘Framing Religion in Constitutional Politics: A View from Indian Constitutional Law’, South Asian History and Culture, 10, 2,124–135.
- 4.
For those who have critically assessed the Indian multicultural state along these lines see Gurpreet Mahajan (2012), Accommodating Diversity: Ideas and Institutional Practices, (New Delhi: Oxford University Press).
- 5.
Unlike other theorists who use similar arguments on similitude to make vastly differing claims on the nature of sovereignty, etc., with exclusive implications, rather than the inclusive implications of Azad’s formulation of tawhīd.
- 6.
In making this point, we borrow Talal Asad’s argument on attributing coherence to a body of thought, i.e. to argue for a form of coherence by which a discourse is held together is not ipso facto to justify or defend that discourse; it is merely to take an essential step in the problem of explaining its compulsiveness. See Asad, Talal. Genealogies of religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam, (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2009).
- 7.
For critical accounts of Jihād shaped by the Global War on Terror, see Faisal Devji 2005. Landscapes of the Jihad, Militancy, Morality and Modernity, Ithaca: Cornell University Press; Darryl Li (2020), The Universal Enemy: Jihad, Empire and the Challenge of Solidarity, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
- 8.
In this formulation of both tawhid and jihad, the influence of Sufism and mysticism, especially that of the Sindhi mystic Sarmad Shaheed on Azad thinking is evident. For more on this see Syeda Hameed, Islamic Seal on India’s Independence, (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1998) pp. 46–50. Azad’s aversion to the importance of taqlīd (unquestioned adherence to the opinions of Islamicjurisprudence/fiqh) was what eventually led to Azad’s estrangement from Shībli Numāni, his political mentor in the early 1910s. See Syeda Hameed’s Introduction to Azad’s edited works in Syeda Saiyidain Hameed eds. India’s Maulana Abul Kalam Azad 1888–1958. (New Delhi: Indian Council for Cultural Relations, Vikas Publishing House, 1990).
- 9.
This was one of the central grounds of debate among Muslim political figures in South Asia in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. See Shaikh, Farzana. (1989). Community and Consensus in Islam: Muslim Representation in Colonial India, 1860–1947 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
- 10.
The struggle with rejecting violent forms of protest was evident in Azad’s own struggle with Gandhi’s approach to non-violence, especially in his calling off of the Non-cooperation in the Chauri Chaura movement. For more on this, see Abul Kalam Azad, Quol-e-Faisal, in Syeda Hameed, India’s Maulana Abul Kalam Azad.
- 11.
Gandhi had already published his tract on Hind Swaraj (Self-Rule) in 1908, where he makes his argument that Swaraj, the word used for freedom from colonial rule by Indian nationalists at that time needs to translate into self-rule rather than mere home-rule. Azad’s position comes very close to Gandhi on this.
- 12.
Azad’s contemporaries like Muhammad Iqbal engaged deeply with modern Western epistemology in order to develop a reconstructed Islamic critique of the same. For more on this see Iqbal, Muhammad; The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam.
- 13.
This view was questioned for its imperial roots in Part I of this paper.
- 14.
These approaches towards toleration are taken from Rainer Forst (2013), Toleration in Conflict: Past and Present, trans. Ciaran Croni, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). While Forst’s magnificent work details various models of toleration drawn from detailed analysis of the history of TransAtlantic political thought, this paper works with these conceptions as useful analytic models rather than historical descriptions.
- 15.
Such as the (politically and historically incorrect) argument that Islamic justifications now have no place in India with the creation of Pakistan.
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Rodrigues, S. (2020). Abul Kalam Azad and the Right to an Islamic Justification of the Indian Constitution. In: Roy, A., Becker, M. (eds) Dimensions of Constitutional Democracy. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3899-5_7
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