the Constitution of India at 70: Artists Respond (SAHMAT)

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THE CONSTITUTION OF INDIA AT 70 CELEBRATE • ILLUMINATE • REJUVENATE • DEFEND

SAHMAT

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First published: 2020 ISBN: 978-93-80536-94-1 Suggested contribution Rs 750

SAHMAT gratefully acknowledges the cooperation of the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation.

Cover: adapted from a poster design by Ram Rahman Design: Rajinder Arora/Ishtihaar Printed at: Fine Art Delhi

Published by:

Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust (SAHMAT) 36, Pandit Ravi Shankar Shukla Lane Near Mandi House, New Delhi 110 001 T: 011-2338 1276/2307 0787 E: sahmat8@yahoo.com www.sahmat.in 4 | The Constitution of India at 70

The Constitution of India at 70 CELEBRATE ILLUMINATE REJUVENATE DEFEND To mark the seventieth anniversary of the Indian Constitution, an art exhibition was mounted by the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust (SAHMAT) 30 January – 22 March 2020 Jawahar Bhavan Dr. Rajendra Prasad Road New Delhi

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n the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of the Indian Constitution – in view of the increasing assault on it and, equally, the resistance mounted in its defence by people across the country – the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust (SAHMAT), in November 2019, initiated a year-long programme of events in commemoration and celebration.

A lecture series on the Constitution was planned, of which the first lecture, ‘The Constitution, 2019’, was delivered by Rajeev Dhavan, senior advocate of the Supreme Court of India, on 26 November 2019.

This was followed by a lecture on ‘70 Years of Citizenship and the Constitution’ by Sanjay Hegde, also senior advocate of the Supreme Court, on 15 February 2020. The third and fourth lectures in the series, by lawyer Rebecca John and art historian Naman Ahuja, respectively, were scheduled to be held on 14 March and 14 April. These, however, as well as subsequent lectures, had to be cancelled due to the Covid lockdown that came into effect in Delhi in mid-March.

Artists and photographers were invited to contribute works to an exhibition titled Celebrate, Illuminate, Rejuvenate, Defend: The Constitution at 70, curated by Aban Raza for SAHMAT. The opening of the exhibition on 30 January 2020, the seventy-second anniversary of the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, was accompanied by a performance of Gandhi in poetry and recitation, ‘Peer Parayi Jaane Re’, presented by Hamari Urdu Mohabbat (HUM). The exhibition, held at Jawahar Bhavan, New Delhi, was on display till 22 March 2020, when it had to be taken down due to the lockdown. The response of artists to SAHMAT’s call was overwhelming. The concept note which accompanied that call, given below, captures the spirit and generosity of their participation, and serves as an introductory text to the exhibition itself.

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Celebrate • Illuminate • Rejuvenate • Defend THE CONSTITUTION OF INDIA AT 70 The Indian Constitution is perhaps one of the most remarkable documents of the twentieth century for the sheer audacity of possibilities that it represented and aspired for. The challenge faced by the makers of the Constitution was hardly enviable: to write a document that would govern the lives of and hopes of millions who lived in a society mired in differences, deep-seated inequalities and routine violence; to produce a text that would inhere trust in a nation still in-the-making.

When it was adopted, the Constitution itself marked the tremendous leap of imagination that the people of the subcontinent had taken on 26 January 1930 when, in its Lahore session, the then Indian National Congress submitted to popular will and gave a call for ‘purna swaraj’ or total independence. In this exhibition, mounted on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the adoption of the Indian Constitution, the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust (SAHMAT) seeks to invoke the same audacity of spirit and imagination.

It needs no elaboration that observing the anniversary of the Indian Constitution is a call given by the besieged document itself. The Constitution, in the Indian context, is much more than just a legal document – it is also a moral document. It is a distillation of the subcontinent’s complex past, a reflection of the then nation’s present and a moral signpost for its future trajectory. The cynicism that met the decision regrading universal adult franchise or the incompatibility of the precepts of personal laws dissipated as Indians, in most cases, took to their individual and collective identities under a democratic republic with unrehearsed ease. The Articles pertaining to Fundamental Rights extended universal citizenship in meaningful ways to a hitherto fractured society.

Yet today, it is precisely these moral tenets of the document that are under direct attack. Attempts to tamper with the Constitution are not necessarily new; almost all those in power who have found the checks on executive power inconvenient have been guilty of this. What is new today, however, is the absolute disdain for the entire corpus of ideas – ideas that themselves are a product of India’s multiversal history – that make up the Constitution, and the attempts to bypass it by means of extra-constitutional actors and precedents. Even the most basic principles of government formation, citizenship, and the freedom to live and think freely are not being spared. It would seem that at the altar of democracy, nothing is sacrosanct any more.

Many of us have felt an increasingly crippling sense of bewilderment, loss and frustration in the last few years. It is this sense that we wished to capture – before it turned into despair, cynicism or apathy. We wished to affirm that there is a sense of the collective that is worth cherishing as we gave a call to our artist friends to unleash their creative powers to coalesce around the document extraordinaire that is the Indian Constitution.

This artists’ exhibition seeks to capture the spirit of audacity, the possibilities for the future and the dream of change through resistance that WE, THE PEOPLE OF INDIA have solemnly resolved to uphold. Let our works invoke the name of the Constitution and become a celebration of the idea of India that we cherish – an idea that not just defines India today, but that will become a foundational pillar of a just society tomorrow.

Let us keep going – from week to week, month to month, year to year – to keep the resilience of collective resistance alive, and to ensure that our spaces and our dreams are not taken away.

Resist the assault on the Constitution!

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70 Years of Citizenship and the Constitution Sanjay Hegde

Three score and ten years ago, we, the people of India, made a tryst with our Constitution. Now the time has come when we are called upon to redeem our pledge, maybe not wholly or in full measure but possibly very substantially. Today, I cannot help but recall the bleak prognostications that were offered as we, in 1950, set out upon our journey of citizenship.

Winston Churchill on 20 September 1947 had warned: How can you suppose that the thousand-year gulf which yawns between Moslem and Hindu will be bridged in 14 months? The Indian parties and political classes do not represent the Indian masses. No arrangement can be made about all the great common services. All will be the preparation for the ensuing Civil War. In handing over the government of India to the so-called political classes you are handing over to men of straw of whom, in a few years, no trace will remain.

Churchill may have had reasons for his pessimism. We Indians, after all, had no experience of being citizens. We had all along been subjects of various Rajahs, Nawabs or of the British King Emperor. We were now being called upon to be citizens of an independent republic. Having fought for freedom from British rule and having secured it, we had begun the task of independently governing ourselves under a Constitution. We entrusted the task to a Constituent Assembly, whose debates continue to illuminate and enlighten us even today.

The Constituent Assembly laboured hard from 9 December 1946 to 26 November 1949, to produce a document that did not meet with immediate universal acclaim. Mr K. Hanumanthayya, expressing his disappointment The Constitution of India at 70 | 11

about the lack of indigeneity in the Indian Constitution, said: “We wanted the music of Veena or Sitar, but here we have the music of an English band.” Nevertheless a mammoth task had been accomplished. As Dr Ambedkar narrated: The Draft Constitution as prepared by the Constitutional Adviser as a text for the Draft Committee to work upon consisted of 243 Articles and 13 Schedules. The first Draft Constitution as presented by the Drafting Committee to the Constituent Assembly contained 315 Articles and 8 Schedules. At the end of the consideration stage, the number of Articles in the Draft Constitution increased to 386. In its final form, the Draft Constitution contains 395 Articles and 8 Schedules.

The total number of amendments to the Draft Constitution tabled was approximately 7,635. Of them, the total number of amendments actually moved in the House was 2,473.

The President of the Constituent Assembly, Dr Rajendra Prasad, prophesied at its birth: Whatever the Constitution may or may not provide, the welfare of the country will depend upon the way in which the country is administered. That will depend upon the men who administer it. It is a trite saying that a country can have only the Government it deserves. Our Constitution has provisions in it which appear to some to be objectionable from one point or another. We must admit that the defects are inherent in the situation in the country and the people at large. If the people who are elected are capable and men of character and integrity, they would be able to make the best even of a defective Constitution. If they are lacking in these, the Constitution cannot help the country. After all, a Constitution like a machine is a lifeless thing. It 12 | The Constitution of India at 70

acquires life because of the men who control it and operate it, and India needs today nothing more than a set of honest men who will have the interest of the country before them.

Seventy years after these words of warning, we are now engaged in a great constitutional conversation about citizenship, which is being fought out on the streets, through ballot boxes and in the courts. This conversation has come about with varying ideas of citizenship all contending in the marketplace of ideas.

There are those who think that they have a first right on citizenship of this country, a right which may extend to even defining the rights of those who are not exactly like them. There are others who dare to assert, at long last, that they will not be treated unequally in the matter of citizenship. There are also those who still cannot fathom what the fuss is all about.

Citizenship is simply the right to have rights. Only a citizen can assert some rights against all, including the state. The loss of citizenship, or a state of statelessness, often renders the individual remediless against state or private action. In western thought, the roots of citizenship go back to the city-states of ancient Greece.

Aristotle’s Politics talks about the nature of citizenship in Athens. The passage reads: It must be admitted that we cannot consider all those to be citizens who are necessary to the existence of the state; for example, children are not citizens equally with grown-up men, who are citizens absolutely, but children, not being grown up, are only citizens on a certain assumption. Nay, in ancient times, and among some nations the artisan class were slaves or foreigners, and therefore the majority of them are so now. The best form of state will not admit them to citizenship; but if they are admitted, then our definition of the virtue of a

citizen will not apply to every citizen nor to every free man as such, but only to those who are freed from necessary services. The necessary people are either slaves who minister to the wants of individuals, or mechanics and labourers who are the servants of the community.

Thus Ancient Greece had different kinds of citizens, and only a full citizen would be able to participate in dayto-day happenings of the state as a male, a patriarch and a warrior. The Roman Republic, after the collapse of the old monarchy, had a few families ruling and they were called patricians. The rest of the citizens were called plebeians. The first Roman law code, Twelve Tables, had separate laws for these two classes. With the tag of citizenship came certain rights, but that too was restricted to certain citizens and not all. Women were always outcast from participating in the Roman Republic.

Thus Ancient Rome and Greece had citizenships not dissimilar to the Indian situation about which Dr B.R. Ambedkar warned: On the 26th of January 1950, we are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality. In politics we will be recognizing the principle of one man one vote and one vote one value. In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man one value. How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions? How long shall we continue to deny equality in our social and economic life? If we continue to deny it for long, we will do so only by putting our political democracy in peril. We must remove this contradiction at the earliest possible moment or else those who suffer from inequality

will blow up the structure of political democracy which this Assembly has so laboriously built up.

Let us now turn to how the Constituent Assembly debated questions of citizenship on three days, i.e.

10 August, 11 August and 12 August, 1949. The idea behind adding citizenship was not in any general sense but citizenship on the date of commencement of the Constitution. It was not the object of the Assembly to lay down a permanent definition of citizenship. Future Parliaments were to have full power to make laws on the question. Echoes of the communally charged atmosphere of the Partition resounded in the Assembly as it debated what eventually got enacted as Article 7.

Though the markers of religious difference were not openly displayed, they are easily recognizable in the debates on Articles 6 and 7 of the Constitution. Article 6 was obviously unexceptionable as it guaranteed rights of citizenship for what were largely Hindu migrants from Pakistan, commonly described in the discourse of the time as refugees.

Mr Punjabrao Deshmukh from Vidarbha, a barrister and a fighter against untouchability, thought that the provisions in the draft Articles made Indian citizenship the cheapest citizenship on earth. Mr Deshmukh thought that Indian citizenship was being given too easily. His grouse was with citizenship by birth. According to him, if the draft Article was to be accepted, even a child born of a lady while she was transiting through the Bombay port would get citizenship. He asked for at least two amendments.

First, just being born in India should not be sufficient, the child should be born to Indian parents. Next, all Hindus and Sikhs residing anywhere in the world should be entitled to Indian citizenship. He said: I do not cite any ground whatsoever that we should do it, unless it is the specious, oft-repeated and The Constitution of India at 70 | 13

nauseating principle of secularity of the State. I think that we are going too far in this business of secularity. Does it mean that we must wipe out our own people, that we must wipe them out in order to prove our secularity, that we must wipe out Hindus and Sikhs under the name of secularity, that we must undermine everything that is sacred and dear to the Indians to prove that we are secular?

Mr Deshmukh emphasized the fact that Pakistan was formed on the basis of religion and all Muslims have an exclusive place for themselves, so accordingly he suggested that only Hindus and Sikhs should be entitled to return as citizens of India.

Pandit Thakurdas Bhargava, also a lawyer from the Punjab, had a slightly different take. He said: If a Muslim comes to India and bears allegiance to India and loves India as we love her, I have nothing but love for that man. But even after the Partition, for reasons best known to themselves, many Musalmans have come to Assam with a view to make a Muslim majority in that province for election purposes and not to live in Assam as citizens of India. My humble submission is that those persons have come here for a purpose which is certainly not very justifiable. Those who have come here on account of disturbances in Pakistan or fear of disturbances there certainly must get an asylum in India. If any nationalist Musalman who is afraid of the Muslims of East Pakistan or West Pakistan comes to India, he certainly should be welcomed. It is our duty to see that he is protected. We will treat him as our brother and a bona fide national of India. In regard to those others who have not come here on account of disturbances, we should not allow them to become citizens of India, if we can help it.

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Mr Rustom K. Sidhva, a Parsi originally from Karachi who represented the Central Provinces, felt that there were communities other than Hindus and Sikhs that needed to be addressed, such as Parsis. He insisted that the Articles did not have any mention of any community per se. Mr Mehboob Ali Baig Saab Bahadur said, “the interpretation put upon the provision by Dr Deshmukh is not at all correct.” In support of his observations, he quoted the instances of the United States of America, Australia and South Africa. He said: Look at those countries. They do not give citizenship rights to Indians even when they have been in those countries for thirty or thirty-five years.

May I put to him the question whether we should follow their examples? Can we with any reason or pretence tell these persons, “Look here, you have not given citizenship rights to Indians living in your countries for decades”? Can we complain against them if we are going to deny them citizenship rights here? Let us not follow those bad examples.

Whether it is possible or not, shall we now follow these retrograde countries like Australia in the matter of conferring citizenship rights and say that citizenship will not be available except on very very strict conditions? It is very strange that Dr Deshmukh should contemplate giving citizenship rights only to persons who are Hindus or Sikhs by religion. He characterized the provision in the Article granting citizenship rights as ridiculously cheap. I would say on the other hand that his conception is ridiculous. Therefore, let us not follow the example of those countries which we are condemning everywhere, not only here but also in the United Nations, and complaining that although Indians have been living in those countries they have not been granted citizenship rights there.

Pandit Nehru opposed religion-based citizenship, saying: One has inevitably to do something which involves the greatest amount of justice to our people and which is the most practical solution of the problem.

You cannot in any such provision lay down more or less whom you like and whom you dislike; you have to lay down certain principles, but any principles that you may lay down is likely not to fit in with a number of cases. It cannot be helped in any event.

Therefore, you see that the principle fixed fits with a vast majority of cases, even though a very small number does not wholly fit in, and there may be some kind of difficulty in dealing with them.

Mr Alladi Krishnaswami Iyer of the Drafting Committee said: We are plighted to the principles of a secular State.

We may make a distinction between people who have voluntarily and deliberately chosen another country as their home and those who want to retain their connection with this country. But we cannot on any racial or religious or other grounds make a distinction between one kind of person and another, or one sect of persons and another sect of persons, having regard to our commitments and the formulation of our policy on various occasions.

Mr Brajeshwar Prasad said: I wish all the people of Pakistan should be invited to come and stay in this country, if they so like.

And why do I say so? I am not an idealist. I say this because we are wedded to this principle, to this doctrine, to this ideal. Long before Mahatma Gandhi came into politics, centuries before recorded history, Hindus and Muslims in this country were one. We were talking, during the time of Mahatma

Gandhi, that we are blood-brothers. May I know if after Partition, these blood-brothers have become strangers and aliens? Sir, it has been an artificial Partition. I think that the mischief of Partition should not be allowed to spread beyond the legal fact of Partition. I stand for common citizenship of all the peoples of Asia, and as a preliminary step, I want that the establishment of a common citizenship between India and Pakistan is of vital importance for the peace and progress of Asia as a whole.

The debates thus were heated and had gone on for more than nine hours over three days. Some members had also suggested that further debate was required.

The members finally came to a consensus that future Parliaments would have the ultimate power to legislate on these questions. Any defects that experience disclosed could thus be rectified at a later date.

The constitutional provisions were only meant to determine citizenship at the time of commencement of the Constitution.

The transitional citizenship clauses were the most complex for the draftsmen to pen down. They had been sent back on two previous occasions. Therefore, at the commencement of the Constitution, persons who had been born in India, or either of whose parents were born in India, or who had ordinarily been resident for five preceding years, or those who had come over from Pakistan, were granted Indian citizenship. Article 11 enabled future Parliaments to make provisions with respect to the acquisition and termination of citizenship and all other matters relating to citizenship.

The substantive framework for citizenship was put in place by the Citizenship Act of 1955, which was enacted by the first Parliament in accordance with the powers set out in Article 11. Under the Citizenship Act, The Constitution of India at 70 | 15

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Citizenship can be acquired by birth, by descent, by registration or by naturalization. Subsequently, rules regarding citizenship were formulated. Currently, the Citizenship Rules of 2009 supplement the Act. Another Act which impacts the discussion on citizenship is the Foreigners Act of 1946, which is a pre-constitutional Act. It was passed shortly after the Second World War, during which the colonial administration was in perpetual fear of German or Japanese infiltrators and spies spreading disaffection among the natives. The Act provides for measures including detention of foreigners and the rules provide for tribunals to determine questions of nationality. Its most significant provision is Section 9, which casts “the onus of proving that such person is not a foreigner or is not a foreigner of such particular class or description . . . upon such person”. Thus, if a person is alleged to be a foreigner, the burden is upon him or her to prove that he or she is in fact a citizen and not a foreigner. This Act has had a devastating effect upon the poor without documents, especially in the context of Assam’s citizenship crisis to which I shall now advert.

Assam and the North East have had a convoluted history and geography which have impacted India, its neighbours and their inhabitants. The Ahoms are but one of the ethnicities that have made the Brahmaputra valley their home. The first Ahom ruler, Sutapa, is said to have come from Yunan in China at the beginning of the thirteenth century. The areas around the modern state of Assam were ceded to the British by the Burmese under the Treaty of Yandabo in 1826.

These fertile but sparsely populated areas were over the years occupied by tea gardens and farms, which attracted peasants from the Bengali parts of British India. Assam was incorporated into Bengal and after the partition of Bengal, for a brief period between 1905

and 1911, ruled from Dacca. In 1912 it again became a separate province. At the time of Independence it had a very mixed population and some of its districts had a Muslim majority. The Sylhet district of Assam province held a referendum and opted to join East Pakistan.

Some districts with substantial Muslim populations, like Dhubri, opted to remain in India relying upon promises made by Lokbandhu Gopinath Bordoloi.

However with all this mixed history and mixed populations, questions of citizenship of the newly independent countries of India and Pakistan had to be determined, with people still crossing and returning over porous borders. At this stage, by a secret administrative exercise, a National Register of Citizens (NRC) for Assam was drawn up in 1951. The Register was not complete in some districts, nor was it drawn up as a fully determinative exercise. When Pakistan broke up over the language question, the bloody crackdown by the Pakistani army led to a huge refugee influx into India, especially the states of Assam, Tripura and West Bengal. After the war ended, under the Indira–Mujib pact, Bangladesh agreed to take back those who had migrated after 25 March 1971, while India agreed to retain those who had entered prior to that date. While Tripura and West Bengal endured the refugee influx, the native Ahoms in Assam viewed it as an accretion to the traditional Congress vote bank of “Ali, Coolie, Bengali”. In a 1978 by-election to the Lok Sabha from Mangaldoi, an unprecedented increase in the number of Muslim names in the voters’ list sparked off protests from the All Assam Students Union (AASU). Resultantly, the Assam agitation against foreigners was sparked off. The agitation had its apogee in the Nellie Massacre of 18 February 1983, when over 2,000 men, women and infants were killed. The massacre led to largescale detentions of the movement’s leaders, which only ended with the Assam Accord of 1985. Under The Constitution of India at 70 | 17

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the Accord post-1971 migrants were to be deported after determination by special tribunals, and those who had migrated between 1966 and 1971 were to be disenfranchised for a period of ten years.

This Accord allowed relative peace to return to Assam, and paved the way for the Assamese student leaders Prafulla Mohanta and Bhrigu Phukan to assume power, as Chief Minister and Cabinet Minister respectively.

As long as the Ahom Gana Parishad (AGP) remained in power, expulsion of aliens remained only a desirable consummation devoutly to be wished for. As the Congress came back into power and regained it for three terms, the ethnic cauldron began to simmer. The then AASU student leader Sarabananda Sonowal got the Illegal Migrants Determination Tribunal (IMDT) struck down by the Supreme Court in 2005, on the ground that casting the burden on the accuser to prove that the respondent was a foreigner was unworkable and arbitrary. The effect of this striking down was that questions of determination of nationality went to the Foreigners Tribunal under the Foreigners Act, where the burden was not on the accuser but on the respondent.

The resultant effect has been huge human misery among the poor and the undocumented. An enumerator of the Election Commission (normally a lower-level government servant) who came across a non-Assamese-speaking family, headed by Mr X who was wearing suspect clothing, marked the voter as doubtful and may have made a reference to the Illegal Migrants Determination Tribunal, which may have sent a notice. That notice may or may not have been served. The matter would have been transferred to the Foreigners Tribunals after the IMDTs were wound up.

Many years later, these Tribunals would proceed ex parte to rule that Mr X could not prove his citizenship

and hence was a foreigner liable to be deported, and in the meanwhile to be detained till such deportation was carried out. The orders of the Tribunal could be challenged in writ courts, but the Gauhati High Court, and often the Supreme Court, had an unblemished record of not interfering by citing the limitations of writ jurisdiction, which could not get into questions of fact.

Within this toxic mess, another bad idea took root.

It was argued by some that if only the 1951 NRC was updated, to take into account those who could trace their ancestry to those on that list, the new list would reveal undoubted citizens because those who failed to prove ancestry would be either illegal immigrants from Bangladesh or internal migrants from India. The Congress government of Tarun Gogoi started a pilot project in a few districts, but had to abandon it in the face of local resistance. In 2013, a Supreme Court Bench headed by Justice Ranjan Gogoi directed the state of Assam to update the 1951 NRC by 1 January 2016. The judgment in the Assam Sanmalita Mahasangh verges on xenophobia when it asks a Constitution Bench to determine if “an influx of illegal migrants into a State of India constitutes ‘external aggression’ and/ or ‘internal disturbance’? Does the expression ‘State’ occurring in this Article refer only to a territorial region or does it also include the people living in the State, which would include their culture and identity?”

The Supreme Court then went on a continued exercise of micromanaging the task of updating the 1951 NRC of Assam and did allow extensions for completion of the exercise. When the final updated NRC was released on 31 August 2019, around 19 lakh applicants did not find their names on it. The majority of exclusions, nearly 11 lakh names, were not Muslim. These figures must be looked at in the context of what the Supreme Court The Constitution of India at 70 | 19

itself had relied upon in its judgment in the Assam Sanmalita case. It records: On 14th July, 2004, in response to an unstarred question pertaining to deportation of illegal Bangladeshi migrants, the Minister of State, Home Affairs, submitted a statement to Parliament indicating therein that the estimated number of illegal Bangladeshi immigrants into India as on 31st December, 2001 was 1.20 crores, out of which 50 lakhs were in Assam.

The NRC updating exercise has now become like Wordsworth’s Lucy, a list with “none to praise and very few to love”. The question is, what is to be done with those who do not figure in the list? Mass deportation is not possible. No country will be willing to reclaim nearly 2 million people, most of whom were not born anywhere else but India. Does the state of Assam detain them, or does the centre provide a path to citizenship, for all or some? It is in this context that the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) of 2019 and the opposition thereto must be seen.

At this stage, the CAA of 2003 during the earlier NDA (National Democratic Alliance) regime must be looked at. It was passed with the support of several opposition parties. The Bill was discussed more as a ‘Dual Citizenship Bill’ for the introduction of the idea of the Overseas Citizen of India. But CAA 2003 introduced a new term called ‘illegal migrant’ – a foreigner who had entered India without a valid passport or visa, or had overstayed his visa. So now the term ‘foreigners’ had two subsets: illegal migrants and other foreigners.

CAA 2003 introduced one more change: it said that those classified as illegal migrants could never become citizens of India and, what’s more, the children born from the union of a citizen and an illegal migrant could never get citizenship. CAA 2003 also introduced 20 | The Constitution of India at 70

a Nationwide Register of Citizens (NCR). Another introduction in 2003 was the National Population Register (NPR), which was not in the Amendment Act but was provided in the Citizenship (Registration of Citizens and Issue of National Identity Cards) Rules, 2003.

At this juncture it is difficult to say why these amendments were necessitated, when citizenship by registration or naturalization was not by right but was discretionary. The government always had the discretion to allow or not, any application for citizenship by registration or naturalization.

However, with the blanket demonization of ‘foreigners without papers’ in CAA 2003, India effectively made it impossible for any foreigner living without papers in India for whatever reason – fleeing persecution, economic opportunities or otherwise – to apply for citizenship. A further crisis was created by which children born of the union of an Indian citizen and a ‘foreigner without papers’ could also not apply for citizenship.

After the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power again in 2014, they set out to correct the mistake they made in CAA 2003. They opened up long-term visas for those non-Muslims fleeing Pakistan and who entered India before December 2014. Subsequently they extended the facility of long-term visas for nonMuslims fleeing from Bangladesh and Afghanistan.

The Union Home Ministry issued a notification, first exempting religious minorities fleeing persecution, i.e.

Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians from Pakistan and Bangladesh, from having a passport as required by the Passport Rules. A subsequent notification included Afghanistan in the list of countries mentioned in the above notification. These notifications, though discriminatory as they recognized

only certain persecuted minorities, went largely unnoticed. In 2016, a Bill reflecting this discrimination was introduced in Parliament, seeking exemption for Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, Sikhs, Christians and Parsis from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan from being classified as ‘illegal migrants’. Thus an attempt was made to apply the concept of ‘illegal migrants’ of CAA 2003 only to Muslim foreigners. The 2016 Bill however lapsed with Parliament’s term.

The BJP’s manifesto for the 2019 election contained the following paragraphs under the heading ‘Nation First’.

12. We are committed to the enactment of the Citizenship Amendment Bill for the protection of individuals of religious minority communities from neighbouring countries escaping persecution.

We will make all efforts to clarify the issues to the sections of population from the North Eastern states who have expressed apprehensions regarding the legislation. We reiterate our commitment to protect the linguistic, cultural and social identity of the people of the North East. Hindus, Jains, Buddhists and Sikhs escaping persecution from India’s neighbouring countries will be given citizenship in India.

There has been a huge change in the cultural and linguistic identity of some areas due to illegal immigration, resulting in an adverse impact on local people’s livelihood and employment. We will expeditiously complete the National Register of Citizens process in these areas on priority. In future we will implement the NRC in a phased manner in other parts of the country.

Thus the BJP manifesto promised citizenship to only Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains escaping persecution. It did not promise citizenship to similarly

placed Christians and Parsis. Also, the manifesto did not cherrypick specific countries from the neighbourhood to identify with persecution. A question is, how did other countries in the neighbourhood, especially Sri Lanka and Myanmar, get excluded in the notifications and in CAA 2019? It may well be political compulsions or legal advice that made ‘Christians and Parsis’ to be included in the notifications and in CAA 2019.

So now we have gone over the full conspectus of circumstances underlying the Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019 and the protests against it. The Act deliberately sets out to classify claims of citizenship based on the religion of the applicant.

Hovering in the background is the electoral promise to have a nationwide registration of citizens and population. Implicit in that promise is the possibility of discriminating between citizens and the general population. Today, as a republic, we are again questioning the constitutional choices made by our founding fathers on secularism and on citizenship.

Citizenship of the United States of America is often described by two culinary metaphors – the melting pot and the salad bowl. Into the melting pot go a whole host of ingredients to melt into a compound American, whose ancestry can be one part Cherokee, one part African, two parts Chinese and four parts Ukrainian, or some other such composition. In a salad bowl, however the ingredients mix but do not fuse.

Hence we have Indian Americans, Chinese Americans, Latino Americans and what not. Whether salad bowl or melting pot, there is no doubt however that the vessel is all American. As Thomas Paine put it, “Our citizenship in the United States is our national character. Our citizenship in any particular state is only our local distinction. By the latter we are known at home, by the former to the world. Our great title is The Constitution of India at 70 | 21

AMERICANS – our inferior one varies with the place.”

If we were to extend the culinary metaphor to Indian citizenship, my dish of choice would be the bhelpuri.

That marvellous mixture, best had on a Bombay beach, has puffed rice (murmura), savoury crisp noodles (sev), fried crisp puris, chopped onions, coriander and spices, all tossed together with a dressing of tamarind, mint and cilantro chutney. Each ingredient is separate and distinct, can be singled out, picked up and separately consumed. However, when these ingredients are mixed in the right proportions and tossed in an overall common vinaigrette, the resultant mixture is an explosion of delight on the tongue and heart. The bhelpuri that is India has Maharashtrians, Gujaratis, Bengalis, Punjabis and many more, who are also Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Buddhists.

An Indian’s multiple markers of identity often leave both majoritarian and minoritarian elements in the same individual. As a Kannadiga Hindu living in Delhi, I am part of a religious majority and of a linguistic minority. Yet I am as wholly and fiercely Indian as the most orthodox Pandit from Varanasi or Maulvi from Deoband, for whom Hindi is a shared majority language.

Over seven decades of a shared Constitution, cricket, Bollywood and a philosophy of “kindly adjust, we are like this only”, has seen a stable nation emerge. India may be an ancient civilization, but as a modern republic it is barely seventy years old. For seventy years this republic has trundled along on an implicit assumption of citizenship. If the operation of a temporary or permanent brute majority in Parliament enables the division of the general population into citizens and others on sufferance, a house divided against itself will not long endure. It is up to us who cherish the constitutional promise of liberty, equality and 22 | The Constitution of India at 70

fraternity to step up and defend those fraternal bonds that have kept us together.

On the streets of India, from Shaheen Bagh to Kerala’s distant shores, citizens have stood up to redeem that pledge in the Indian Constitution’s poetic preamble.

Indians now seek to secure to all its citizens, “JUSTICE, social, economic and political; LIBERTY of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship; EQUALITY of status and of opportunity; and to promote among them all FRATERNITY assuring the dignity of the individual and the unity and integrity of the Nation.” These pledges cannot be redeemed if our citizenry is divided by rulers into the rightful and the doubtful. Martin Luther King Jr had dreamt that “one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” Let Indians too dream on. Jai Hind.

Sanjay Hegde is a senior advocate of the Supreme Court of India.

Can the historic art of our Constitution look to the future?

Naman Ahuja The Constitution is a handwritten, illustrated document that bears a series of signatures at the end. As such, it is an artefact that belongs to a long historical tradition where the most precious manuscripts, farmaans and orders of any kingdom were written by hand and endorsed by the signature of its ruler. Embedded within are the signatures of the calligrapher and the artist.

The Constitution carries the signatures of 284 members of the Constituent Assembly, the recurring name of the calligrapher ‘Prem’, the signatures of the chief artist Nandalal Bose and those who worked under his guidance at his atelier: Santiniketan. The calligraphy in the book was done by Prem Behari Narain Raizada, and several students of Santiniketan worked on the borders that frame each page.

The calligraphy was done on pages that were given to be framed in the hashi’a (borders) in the traditional way, as used to be the case with Mughal and Sultanate manuscripts. There are two types of borders that have been used throughout the manuscript. While all pages have a simple, gold-speckled border, some at the opening of a Schedule and the page where every Schedule ends have a second, inner border of gold ornament.

There are two original illustrated copies of the Constitution. The principal one was handwritten in

English, the second copy was handwritten in Hindi, and they were illuminated by different groups of artists.

Both the original copies are kept sealed in a heliumfilled case in Parliament House in Delhi. The team of artists who worked on them was led by Nandalal Bose, the principal of Santiniketan’s Kala Bhavana.

The facsimile of the Constitution has been reprinted with depreciating quality over the years by the Survey of India. My own copy is an awful edition from 2000 that was prepared at the behest of the Union Ministry of Culture by the Survey of India through a Delhibased printer. Three years ago, it was agreed that the Constitution would be an important historical document to display at a major international exhibition I was co-curating, at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, Mumbai and the National Museum, Delhi, called India and the World. And since it was not disregard for the Constitution I wished to showcase, I had to find an earlier imprint from the 1950s, when greater respect was shown by the Survey of India in its work.

In various articles and blogs over the past few years, Bose’s illustrations have posed a problem for modern viewers. Bose harnessed a variety of Indian art traditions and built a narrative in which characters and stories from myth are punctuated with those from The Constitution of India at 70 | 23

actual history; the last three pictures are concerned only with the landscape of India. Taken together, the illustrations of the land of forest, desert, sea and mountain start with the seal of a Harappan bull, replete with power and dignity, heralded by the markings of an unknown language of yore. The illustrations reveal that civilizations have come and gone, and as we move between chapters, some are located in palaces, while others are set in nature.

The forested hermitages of the rishis begin the part of the Constitution on citizenship, belonging. Part III on fundamental rights is proclaimed by Ram, Sita and Lakshman. The great dilemma of what is righteous action is typified by the lowered head of Arjun unable to take the lead, while an impassive Krishna stands behind at the start of Part IV: directive principles of state policy. The great moment from the life of Ashoka,

Part IV of the Constitution: Directive Principles of State Policy 24 | The Constitution of India at 70

that of the second (historical) division of the relics of the Buddha and the sending of his remains to every part of South Asia, opens Part VII: this tells us the role of each state’s authority in the Union. Each illustration is drawn from a different epoch of Indian art, most of it rendered in gold – all in the narrow horizontal format of traditional Indian manuscripts, or pothis. And in each case an effort has been made to find a narrative that behoves the content – yet this is tacit, never explicit, and one about which readers are required to think.

The paintings draw on the careful absorption of many styles of Indian art: the wall paintings of Ajanta, Bagh and the book illustrations of Rajasthan, the Mughal, Deccani and Pahari traditions, the sculptures of Konarak, Bharhut, Amaravati, Mahabalipuram and the Chola south. Santiniketan’s curriculum had, for over three decades by this stage, actively encouraged its

Part V of the Constitution: The Union

Part XIV of the Constitution: Services under the Union and the States

teachers and students to learn from the art traditions of diverse parts of the world, all the while remaining actively located in India, and this required students to embody the spirit of a rich inheritance of Indian art. It was the years of working on these ideas that lent their influence to the linear illustrations on the frontispiece of each part of the Constitution.

The Kala Bhavana ethos comes through in the collaborative nature of the chelas working with their Master Moshai, as Bose was known to his students. It is usually said that Bose intended to tell the history of India chronologically through his choice of illustrations. Yet, as every editor and curator knows, selecting one episode over another must be guided by some rationale.

What do Bose’s choices reveal? Further, a question also arises on what determined the selection of the

Part III of the Constitution: : Special Provisions relating to Certain Classes

specific narratives chosen to epitomize each period.

Other questions too emerge. The entire choice seems to be centred on a selection of heroes (and only one female heroine, Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi) rather than a history of the people. Is this a bolshy self-assertion intended to impart national pride? This personalitycentric vision of the past is typical of the heroism implicit in modernism, and art historians today have often critiqued the absence of women in the way artists thought at the time. And thus, in many ways, the Constitution is a modernist project. As much as the words are to shape our future, the illustrations present a vision of the Indian past; a very particular idea of the past, as championed in the Indian national movement.

However, not even Bose and other nationalists of the 1940s could have quite predicted how their heroes would take on overgrown proportions 50 years later.

Part III of the Constitution: Fundamental Rights Constitution of India

Part VII of the Constitution: Official Language The Constitution of India at 70 | 25

On 1 January 1993, Justice Harinath Tilhari delivered a judgement that the illustrations contained in the Constitution explained the concept of secularism and cultural heritage as one in which there was no negation of religion. Further, the arguments put forth by the Vishwa Hindu Adhivakta Sangh to the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court, to constitutionally seek ‘darshan’ of Ram, included one that the characters rendered in illustrations in the Constitution were ‘Constitutional Personalities’ validated by their presence in the book, and that included Akbar, Ram and others.

The two original copies of the Constitution, with its rich diversity of artistic themes and styles, are kept sealed in a helium-filled case in Parliament House in Delhi.

The pictures are based on a history of Indian art from the Harappan civilization up to Independence in 1947. Each interprets a specific style from a historical epoch linking the nation with its artistic history. The nomenclature of these different historical epochs, however, is itself something that changes constantly.

We no longer use phrases listed in the Constitution, such as ‘Mohenjodaro period’ or ‘Epic period’, and we try hard to not continue with the colonial method of periodizing Indian history into ‘Muslim period’, ‘Vedic period’ and ‘British period’, which Bose and his team were raised on. This artefact, then, like all artefacts, has to be looked at in the context of the time when it was painted, and the compulsions or imperatives that guided its painting and iconography.

If the invocation of history is merely to inspire national pride in great men who built a culture, then we will never realize a better future, for what was better was in the past. Why would we even need to change? Can one argue, therefore, that if Bose had paid a little heed to illustrating the atrocities that our culture has perpetuated or found hard to shake off, we would have been forced to remember why indeed we need this Constitution? In a time when battles are being fought

26 | The Constitution of India at 70

all around us to define a future while we want to hold on to a perceived identity informed by our past, the tension presented by interpreting the spirit of the illustrations seems to mirror our present condition. Is this tension to be our fate? Calibrating the upholding of tradition while looking to modernity forces us to take a position on history and decide what it is that qualifies as tradition.

Recognizing that tension, or that anxiety itself, then, is the productive lens through which we today can revitalize and find a way to salve our dashed hope in the nation: one which makes peace with the values of the past. Read, then, in the illustration, not the hero Arjun, but allow his lowered head to indicate his quandary. Read past the image of the hero Ashoka into the action of the division of the relics instead, and why the atrocities of war led him to realize a need to spread the ashes of the paragon of ahimsa. It was the crises, the tensions or anxieties these characters found a way through that should be the titles or the message of the paintings, rather than an identification of the style or the name of the character. The role their anxiety played is enabling, it can keep us going. These, then, truly can emerge as paintings of a triumphant modernism, indicating the disturbances and failures that they gave direction to.

It is in the reading of the vulnerabilities of the circumstances and plots in which these heroes emerged that we today may find succour and hope.

Naman Ahuja, curator and art historian, is Professor of Indian Art History at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

This article was first published in Mint on 25 January 2020; see https://www.livemint.com/mint-lounge/features/can-the-historicart-of-our-constitution-look-to-the-future-11579885322689.html The Constitution of India at 70 | 27

Curatorial note: The Constitution of India at 70 Aban Raza The date 5th August commemorates several blows to the Indian Constitution. A new series of assaults began on that date in the year 2019 with the unconstitutional lockdown and bifurcation of the state of Jammu & Kashmir. The date in 2020 cemented another brick of injustice in the grand edifice of assaults. The Supreme Court, which has failed to decide on the basic question of constitutionality regarding Jammu & Kashmir, unanimously passed a judgment fraught with contradictions in the Babri Masjid–Ramjanmabhoomi case, catering to majoritarian sentiments.

In addition, the introduction of the National Register of Citizens (NRC), National Population Register (NPR) and the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) by the current political dispensation predictably led to a climate of great intolerance and instillation of fear. An entire people were called termites, and those very people stood to lose their citizenship.

The legitimacy of communal language, the cynical politics of identities, led to agitations in universities, which organically spread into the streets. From this Orwellian din and amidst all the dirt emerged Shaheen Bagh(s), promising the blossom of resistance.

The year of all this upheaval was also the year the Constitution of India turned 70. The idea of India was formalized in this text and it was meant to be a workin-progress. A document extraordinaire that was unimaginatively attacked had to be defended by one 28 | The Constitution of India at 70

and all, for each one of us has a responsibility towards it. This formulated the framework of an exhibition organized by SAHMAT, entitled Celebrate, Illuminate, Rejuvenate, Defend: The Constitution of India at 70.

The exhibition was seen as a contribution to the developments on the streets. It was an attempt to amplify the voice of resistance. It was an effort to take a collective stand against all the unconstitutional acts of the ruling dispensation.

In that spirit, 54 artists came together to speak up and join with the guardians of the Constitution on the streets. With time, more voices attached themselves to the exhibition and the number of participating artists grew to 70. The idea was to expand it as much

to include as many voices, as much representation and as much resistance. The works ranged from paintings to banners, from sculptures to video, and also incorporated photography and poetry.

Art, like resistance, needs to be created, needs to respond and remain relevant to its socio-political events, and needs to make a statement against all nuances of injustice. The Constitution provides us with a path to address such needs, and also to build a society where the identity of each and every individual is appreciated and is allowed to be.

To quote from the call given by Sahmat to artists and the concept note of the exhibition: The exhibition seeks to capture the spirit of audacity, the possibilities for the future and the dream of change through resistance that WE, THE PEOPLE OF INDIA have solemnly resolved to uphold.

Let our works invoke the name of the Constitution and become a celebration of the idea of India that we cherish – an idea that not just defines India today, but that will become a foundational pillar of a just society tomorrow.

Aban Raza is a visual artist based in Delhi.

The Constitution of India at 70 | 29

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ABAN RAZA if it cannot be justified, it should be dismantled Etching, 16.5’’x26’’ The Constitution of India at 70 | 31

ACHIA ANZI Drawing Citizenship after Nandalal Bose Pen on paper, iron and plywood, 3.5’’x5.5’’ each 32 | The Constitution of India at 70

ADIL KALIM Hum Dekhengey Pen and ink on paper, 24’’x18’’ The Constitution of India at 70 | 33

AGNEYA SINGH We Are Not Afraid Mixed-media,16.5”x25” 34 | The Constitution of India at 70

ANITA DUBE Protest banner Paint on synthetic sari 216”x39” The Constitution of India at 70 | 35

ANITA KHEMKA IMRAN KOKILOO Hanging by the Thread, Protest/Democracy Teak wood and two digital prints on archival paper 30’’x30’’ 36 | The Constitution of India at 70

ANUPAM ROY Untitled Digital print, 12’’x17’’ The Constitution of India at 70 | 37

ARPANA CAUR Leaves Gouache on paper, 19’’x15.5’’ 38 | The Constitution of India at 70

ARSHI IRSHAD AHMADZAI Na-Shanas Ink on kora cloth, 160’’x48’’ The Constitution of India at 70 | 39

ARUNKUMAR H.G. Celebrating the Constitution of India Digital print, 17’’x12’’ 40 | The Constitution of India at 70

BIRENDER YADAV The flower of hopelessness Bronze and newspaper collage, 23’’x6’’ The Constitution of India at 70 | 41

A Good Riot. Delhi

Still searching for corpses… Delhi CHANDAN GOMES A Good Riot Photograph, varying sizes 42 | The Constitution of India at 70

Shakeela Aapi told me that hope is a luxury she cannot afford. Her home was looted and then burnt. Shiv Vihar, Delhi

In this world, We walk on the roof of hell Gazing at flowers.

Mustafabad, Delhi

DEBASIS The Subcontinent in Red Watercolour, pen and ink on paper, 21’’x16’’ The Constitution of India at 70 | 43

DEEPANI SETH Temple Entry Collage, set of 12, 19.5’’x14.5’’ each 44 | The Constitution of India at 70

The Constitution of India at 70 | 45

DHRUBAJIT SARMA Bamboo blossoms Photo transfer on wood, set of 3, 13”x10” each 46 | The Constitution of India at 70

DIVYA SINGH Cruor Oil on canvas, 24’’x24’’ The Constitution of India at 70 | 47

GARGI RAINA Reclaiming the Lotus [Maquette] 2020 Wood, metal sheet, gouache, print, 30’’x21’’ 48 | The Constitution of India at 70

GARIMA GUPTA Bagh Carbon transfer, 10”x8” The Constitution of India at 70 | 49

GIGI SCARIA Untitled Digital print, 20’’x34’’

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The Constitution of India at 70 | 51

GOPA Untitled Paper and silver foil, set of 5, 8’’x12’’ each 52 | The Constitution of India at 70

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caxs dks <sj dj nks lax:j feVk Mkyks /kwy esa feyk nks yqf/k;kuk ftyk esjh gfj;kyh viuk dke djsxh--nks lky--- nl lky ckn lokfj;k¡ fQj fdlh daMD‍Vj ls iwNsaxh ;g dkSu&lh txg gS eq>s cjukyk mrkj nsuk tgk¡ gjs ?kkl dk taxy gS eSa ?kkl gw¡] eSa viuk dke d:¡xk eSa vkids gj fd,&/kjs ij mx vkÅ¡xk A & ik”k

The Constitution of India at 70 | 53

GURU CHARAN MURMU I am black but, I am not a buffalo Ink on paper, 16’’x13’’ 54 | The Constitution of India at 70

JAHANGIR JANI Sacred mountain Acrylic on canvas, 24’’x36’’ The Constitution of India at 70 | 55

JYOTHIDAS K.V. User Manual for the Largest Democracy Mixed media, 76’’x36’’ 56 | The Constitution of India at 70

KATHYAYINI DASH The Emperor’s New Clothes Watercolour on cloth and wood, 36’’x24’’x48’’

The Constitution of India at 70 | 57

KAUSAR JAHAN DINU MONDAL, MOHD ZAKI AFSAR, RONI BACHAR Manipulated freedom Woodcut, 124’’x54’’ 58 | The Constitution of India at 70

KHANDAKAR OHIDA Inquilabi Ishtekbal Tempera on canvas, 36’’x58’’ The Constitution of India at 70 | 59

KHURSHEED AHMAD Delhi Agreement Mixed media Set of 4, 15’’x20’’ each

60 | The Constitution of India at 70

The Delhi Agreement, 1952

The representatives of Kashmir Government conferred with the representatives of Indian Government and arrived at an agreement in order to endorse the main decisions of the Constituent Assembly of the State of J&K. This arrangement was later on known as the “Delhi Agreement, 1952”. The main features of this agreement were: i. in view of the uniform and consistent stand taken up by the Jammu and Kashmir Constituent Assembly that sovereignty in all matters other than those specified in the Instrument of Accession continues to reside in the State, the Government of India agreed that, while the residuary powers of legislature vested in the Centre in respect of all states other than Jammu and Kashmir, in the case of the latter they vested in the State itself; ii. it was agreed between the two Governments that in accordance with Article 5 of the Indian Constitution, persons who have their domicile in Jammu and Kashmir shall be regarded as citizens of India, but the State legislature was given power to make laws for conferring special rights and privileges on the ‘state subjects’

in view of the ‘State Subject Notifications of 1927 and 1932: the State legislature was also empowered to make laws for the ‘State Subjects’ who had gone to Pakistan on account of the communal disturbances of 1947, in the event of their return to Kashmir; iii. as the President of India commands the same respect in the State as he does in other Units of India, Articles 52 to 62 of the Constitution relating to him should be applicable to the State. It was further agreed that the power to grant reprieves, pardons and remission of sentences etc; would also vest in the President of India’ iv. the Union Government agreed that the State should have its own flag in addition to the Union flag, but it was agreed by the State Government that the State flag would not be a rival of the Union flag; it was also recognised that the Union flag should have the same status and position in Jammu and Kashmir as in the rest of India, but for historical reasons connected with the freedom struggle in the State, the need for continuance of the State flag was recognised v. there was complete agreement with regard to the position of the

Sadar-i-Riyasat; though the Sadar-i-Riyasat was to be elected by the State Legislature, he had to be recognised by the President of India before his installation as such; in other Indian States the Head of the State was appointed by the President and was as such his nominee but the person to be appointed as the Head, had to be a person acceptable to the Government of that State; no person who is not acceptable to the State Government can be thrust on the State as the Head. The difference in the case of Kashmir lies only in the fact that Sadar-i-Riyasat will in the first place be elected by the State legislature itself instead of being a nominee of the Government and the President of India.

With regard to the powers and functions of the Sadar-i-Riyasat the following argument was mutually agreed upon a. the Head of the State shall be a person recognised by the President of the Union on the recommendations of the Legislature of the State; b. he shall hold office during the pleasure of the President; c. he may, by writing under his hand addressed to the President, resign his office;

d. subject to the foregoing provisions, the Head of the State shall hold office for a term of five years from the date he enters upon his office; e. provided that he shall, notwithstanding the expiration of his term, continue to hold the office until his successor enters upon his office” vi. with regard to the fundamental rights, some basic principles agreed between the parties were enunciated; it was accepted that the people of the State were to have fundamental rights. But in the view of the peculiar position in which the State was placed, the whole chapter relating to ‘Fundamental Rights’ of the Indian Constitution could not be made applicable to the State, the question which remained to be determined was whether the chapter on fundamental rights should form a part of the State Constitution of the Constitution of India as applicable to the State; vii. with regard to the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court of India, it was accepted that for the time being, owing to the existence of the Board of Judicial Advisers in the State, which was the highest judicial authority in the State, the Supreme Court should have only appellate jurisdiction;

viii. there was a great deal of discussion with regard to the “Emergency Powers”; the Government of India insisted on the application of Article 352, empowering the President to proclaim a general emergency in the State; the State Government argued that in the exercise of its powers over defence (Item 1 on the Union List), in the event of war or external aggression, the Government of India would have full authority to take steps and proclaim emergency but the State delegation was, however, averse to the President exercising the power to proclaim a general emergency on account of internal disturbance.

In order to meet the viewpoint of the State’s delegation, the Government of India agreed to the modification of Article 352 in its application to Kashmir by the addition of the following words: “but in regard to internal disturbance at the request or with the concurrence of the Government of the State.” At the end of clause (1) Both the parties agreed that the application of Article 356, dealing with suspension of the State Constitution and 360, dealing with financial emergency, was not necessary.

The Constitution of India at 70 | 61

MAD PAULE I will not be a rhinoceros Digital print on canvas, 28’’x40’’

I will not be a rhinoceros This work is inspired by Eugene Ionesco’s Play ‘Rhinoceros’, written in 1959, an avant-garde drama considered an important literature which is classified as Theater of the Absurd.

Rhinoceros in the play is symbolic of Nazism, Fascism and Mob mentality.

The Absurdity of man turning into a rhinoceros through various stages and giving in finally to become one.

But some resist and do not capitulate.

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MAHAVIR SINGH BISHT Shaheen Bagh, January 2020 Photograph, 24’’x36’’ The Constitution of India at 70 | 63

MAHULA GHOSH Death of an Idea Mixed media, 10.5’’x15.5’’ 64 | The Constitution of India at 70

MEGHA MADAN Untitled Collagraph, 23’’x15.5’’ The Constitution of India at 70 | 65

MITHU SEN Untitled Mixed media collage-drawing with water colour, ink, fabric, metal leaf and perforation on Indian hand-made paper, 22’’x28’’ 66 | The Constitution of India at 70

MUJTABA RIZVI Khoon-jigrè yem wuzu-kor, tastaharath-kyah karae (Those who perform wuzu with blood, what do they need ablutions for) Digital painting, 24’’x19’’ The Constitution of India at 70 | 67

NALINI MALANI The Constitution Preamble Video, 3 minutes 58 seconds 68 | The Constitution of India at 70

NAVJOT ALTAF Collective Voice Digital print on acrylic, 1976, 36’’x36’’ The Constitution of India at 70 | 69

NEERAJ SINGH KHANDKA Ik Onkar Woodcut, 22’’x15.5’’ 70 | The Constitution of India at 70

NEHA GREWAL She Did Not Exist Graphite and plaster on paper, 33’’x23’’ each panel, triptych The Constitution of India at 70 | 71

NILIMA SHEIKH Foreboding Tempera on Sanganer vasli paper, 17.5’’x23.5’’ 72 | The Constitution of India at 70

ORIJIT SEN Desh Premi Digital drawing, 36’’x24’’ The Constitution of India at 70 | 73

PABLO BARTHOLOMEW Gandhi Statue, Machlipatnam District, Andhra Pradesh, 1977 B&W negative converted to pigment print, 36’’x24’’ 74 | The Constitution of India at 70

PARTHIV SHAH Hum Ek The—Rahenge Digitally constructed image, 16’’x32’’ The Constitution of India at 70 | 75

PREETI SINGH Untitled Watercolour on paper, 16’’x20’’ 76 | The Constitution of India at 70

PROBIR GUPTA ‘Where the mind is without fear’ - Tagore Steel, fibre glass, aluminium and glass, 50’’x39’’x18’’ The Constitution of India at 70 | 77

PUSHPAMALA N. Eugenics Archival inkjet print, 36’’x36’’ 78 | The Constitution of India at 70

RAJINDER ARORA To be Indian…

Digital print on mount, 36’’x24’’ The Constitution of India at 70 | 79

RAM RAHMAN Jamia 2019 Digital print, 36’’x24’’ 80 | The Constitution of India at 70

RISHABH ARORA Shadows of Struggle Sunboard and medium density fibreboard, 27”x25” The Constitution of India at 70 | 81

SAJEEV VISWESWARAN Pellet Injuries Linocut, set of 2, 16’’x12’’ each 82 | The Constitution of India at 70

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SALIK ANSARI (Project and concept) AMEER HAMZA (Design collaborator) Flight of Hope, Colour print on paper, 11’’x8’’, 10 pieces #wethepeopleofindia The Constitution of India at 70 | 85

SAMEER KULAVOOR Multiply Against Divisive Politics Inkjet print on canvas, 36’’x28’’ 86 | The Constitution of India at 70

SAMIT DAS From the series Bibliography in progress 2016-17 Mixed media, 24’’x16’’ The Constitution of India at 70 | 87

SANNA IRSHAD MATTOO I’ll never forget the day my breath started fading away…

Photographs, set of 12, 12’’x8’’ each 88 | The Constitution of India at 70

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SATWINDER KAUR Communication 2 Woodcut, 20’’x15’’ 90 | The Constitution of India at 70

SHASHIKANT Education of India Mixed media, 14.5”x11.5” The Constitution of India at 70 | 91

SHIVANGI SINGH Promises of the Constitution Digital print, 35’’x35’’ 92 | The Constitution of India at 70

SIMAR PUNEET Vehicle of Life Digital print, 36’’x36’’ The Constitution of India at 70 | 93

SOURAV BRAHMACHARI Bhim Power No.1 Print on e-matt, 38’’x25’’ 94 | The Constitution of India at 70

SUMEDH RAJENDRAN Untitled Ink on paper, 31.5’’x23.5’’ The Constitution of India at 70 | 95

TSERING NEGI Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

Woodcut, 21’’x15’’ 96 | The Constitution of India at 70

VALAY SINGH Liberty may make mistakes but tyranny is the death of a nation (Written on the wall of an army camp in Tengnoupal in Manipur, this quote is by Giacomo Matteotti [d. 1924], an Italian socialist politician who was killed by Fascist goons) Epson print on matte, 14’’x26’’ The Constitution of India at 70 | 97

VIBIN GEORGE A forcefully removed part Mixed media, 9.5’’x19.5’’ 98 | The Constitution of India at 70

VIJAY S. JODHA Unconstitutional & Constitutional Digital art on canvas, 33’’x33’’ The Constitution of India at 70 | 99

VINIT GUPTA Jantar Mantar 2019 Photograph, 36’’x24’’ 100 | The Constitution of India at 70

VISHAL KUMAR Shaheen Bagh Paint on cloth, 120”x56” The Constitution of India at 70 | 101

VIVAN SUNDARAM Understanding the Preamble Photograph, 33’’x33’’ 102 | The Constitution of India at 70

‘Our constitution, our country, our survival’:1 singing with and amidst difference Arushi Vats aaj bāzār meñ pā-ba-jaulāñ chalo dast-afshāñ chalo mast o raqsāñ chalo ḳhāk-bar-sar chalo ḳhūñ-ba-dāmāñ chalo raah taktā hai sab shahr-e-jānāñ chalo – Faiz Ahmad Faiz, ‘Aaj bāzār meñ pā-ba-jaulāñ chalo’ . . . the force of Ambedkar’s critique is itself based on an axiomatic affirmation that unconditional equality exists even within and beyond the worst experience of inequality.

– Soumyabrata Choudhury, in Ambedkar and Other Immortals: An Untouchable Research Programme

A December evening in Delhi is an invasive guest – the bite in the air penetrating through the thickest shawl, laying claim upon each sense as inhalation raises cold blades which cut into nasal passages and exhalation becomes visible as white fog. There are many lanes in Jasola Vihar, but in December 2019 each led to Shaheen Bagh – a site, an event, an exercise in unfettering imagination from the shackles of hollowed institutions – where many breaths mingled, transgressing limits of individuation to arrive at a body politic. Since the first sit-in protest on 15 December, the voices and cadences of Shaheen Bagh rose and multiplied, such that on 30 January 2020, when the exhibition, The Constitution at 70, opened at Jawahar Bhavan, its singing resounded

across miles, through metro tunnels, bus stops and news alerts on mobile devices, into the exhibition space – not as a spectre or a disembodied muse, but as a companion and compatriot. The frequencies from the various places where citizens had gathered across the country rang through the hall of the exhibition, but nowhere were they as audible as in the banner painted

by Vishal Kumar, which had hung at Shaheen Bagh and then journeyed to Jawahar Bhavan, proclaiming in bold letters a translation of Brecht’s ‘Motto to the Svendborg Poems’ (1939): In the dark times Will there also be singing?

Yes, there will also be singing About the dark times.

This banner was accompanied by an image of a sari by Anita Dube inscribed with a call for azaadi, understood as distinct from liberation or freedom from tyranny.

Azaadi is dynamic – it is the joy of self-determination, the right to refuse external domination even if its source is intimate or wearing the garb of legitimacy.

An image taken of a banner held up by protestors at Shaheen Bagh was displayed, with the text painted on the cloth declaring: “When injustice becomes a law, resistance becomes a duty.” What could perhaps best capture the ethics of protests that marked public spaces in various cities is a sense of democratic duty.

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This sense understood citizenry as an active conduit, of the right of bodies that make a nation to challenge being reduced, firstly, to a populace or a biometric enumeration, and secondly, to ‘bare life’, and so to not be acquiescent to the demands of absolutism or accept the tacit and material subjugation of peoples.

Perhaps no act is removed from its historical location, but history is an open field – as much a space for friendship and camaraderie across the confines of contemporaneity, as an invitation to respond and resist beyond immediate wrongs. The proximities yielded by the practice of resistance and assertion of truth to power pierce the fabric of temporal distance, and it is these possibilities of solidarity to which the movements of 2019 and the exhibition contribute.

In the introduction to Soumyabrata Choudhury’s Ambedkar and Other Immortals, Aishwary Kumar terms the practice of glancing above the walls of linear time as “embracing the mutinies of imagination”,2 and such imagination was at play within the exhibition.

The groundwork of the exhibition lay in simultaneity with a series of injunctions and acts by the Indian state – beginning with the revocation of Article 370 in Kashmir in August, the Ayodhya verdict in November, the sinuous unfolding of the Citizenship Amendment Bill in December. To organize these as successions is to overlook the histories of violence and hate, institutional erosion and infrastructural overtures which have bolstered a majoritarian, punitive, carceral and colonial-settler apparatus. It is also to erase crucial extra/pre-legal interventions of the state which preceded the articulation of these gestures in the realm of law; it is to deny genealogies of oppression and resistance, and narratives of collectivity and persistence. As Mirza Waheed wrote in the wake of suspension of communication channels and internet in the Kashmir valley in August 2019, “A nightmare 104 | The Constitution of India at 70

returns. . . . Then you realize the nightmare never really ended.”3 In Khursheed Ahmad’s works on paper titled Delhi Agreement, the 1952 document ensuring autonomy of the state of Kashmir within India is presented and intervened upon, as a mirror to the present and preceding infringements in the liberties of the region by the Indian state.

In selecting the historical mark of 70 for what is categorized as a living document, the curatorial call, itself an invocation to contact – to respond, join, engage or refuse – is producing the event of association. Association here is understood not as an ascriptive or assigned relation, but as the emergent exchanges within groups of people who collect, assemble, advance into shared terrains of radical thought – such as the artists in this exhibition, who grapple with tyrannies of the mind and of the law; with prevailing distribution of restrictions and precarity to some, and impunity and quasi-authority to others; with their own distinct geographic and political locations; with prolonged or recent practices of dissent, among other concerns. As individuals, they are custodians of unique personal trajectories against varied modes and instances of the abuse of power. However, in responding to the arch of oppression, extraction and denial of humanity which was recurrently enforced by state and non-state actors through the breadth of the calendar year 2019, as well as ‘2019’, the threshold for a non-democratic assault on the pillars of democracy – a signpost in the continuation of the agenda to formalize majoritarian divisions; and the container of large-scale citizen-led activism and protests signifying the limit of a fragmented citizenry that would gather, organize, agitate as its very survival was threatened – they are practising a form of association that grows from contingency of assembly into a fraternity of shared aspirations.

The title of the exhibition, Celebrate, Illuminate, Rejuvenate, Defend: The Constitution of India at 70 – which presented 65 works by 70 artists, produced around and on the longstanding and current crises of selfdetermination and pluralism in India – interpellates the many ways in which a tradition of secular ethics and constitutional morality needs to be understood, recognizing both its faultlines and successes, such that one is neither enchanted by its oratory nor nihilistic in sight of its failures. The title echoes across the annals of history to another cry, a declaration transcribed on a poster designed by Parthiv Shah for SAHMAT in December 1992: “Aaj koi naara na hoga, sirf desh bachaana hoga” (There shall be no slogans today, our only task is to save the nation). In smaller type, the words “Let Us Defend Our Secular Tradition” appear above this.4 It is interesting to note that this and other posters issued in large numbers and pasted in public spaces by SAHMAT, followed by Anhad Garje, a series of performances from the Sufi–Bhakti tradition organized by SAHMAT in various cities, responded to the destruction of the Babri Masjid and the atmosphere of religious hate through art that spoke to the errancies of its times – a watershed in modern Indian history. Parthiv Shah, a key collaborator of Sahmat, also participated in the Constitution at 70 exhibition, with a digitally created image that depicts key figures of the modern Indian tradition of egalitarian and revolutionary politics performing an act that unites protests far and disparate – the walking together of different minds, marching as a performance of unity with heterogeneity. One sees in the commingling of figures spanning centuries – Ambedkar, Gandhi, Savitribai and Jyotirao Phule, Bhagat Singh, Rohith Vemula, among others – the many struggles, voices and actions that are joined in their enunciation of a different world.

By mounting a series of responses as the framework for the exhibition, the valence of the moment becomes palpable – what is on the line is collective futurity and the present-day survival of peoples, landscapes and memory. In positing the ‘Constitution’ as a site for revision and rearticulation of new egalitarian concerns, the exhibition is cognizant of both its historical and immediate supplicancy to power, and its emancipatory scaffolding of democracy and pluralism that must be both defended and built anew. The clarion of transformative action reverberates through the title and the exhibition, which seeks to renew not just constitutional values at stake but the practice of exhibition-making as a site for activist energies as well. The exhibition continues SAHMAT’s sustained engagement with a powerful position, which Geeta Kapur describes as “prodding the state to declare its hand”.5 Through artworks which excavate and reveal the many pathways of dissent, enfolded in and exceeding the limits of the Constitution as both document and as a historical process that belongs to and is safeguarded by the public, the exhibition can be seen as an utterance in conjunction with the secular movements that have risen across streets, university campuses and among the diaspora. As a voice in this rallying cry, the curatorial mandate seeks to perform a classificatory function that sets apart art which is political from politics as art-making. In Conflictual Aesthetics, Oliver Marchart notes that political activism in art is seen as a disturbance to the smooth functioning of the field. And not without reason – wherever the political breaks in, a space of contingency (i.e., a space for maneuver) opens up within the institutional framework of a given field. Suddenly,

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there becomes an awareness that things can be changed, that they may function differently, or that they may not function at all – a terrifying prospect, in the functionary’s mind.6 The Constitution at 70 performs this disruption, opening a contingent moment where the civic and radical impulse is foundational to art-making, which does not bely its ideological import but celebrates it. In selecting a critical moment when thousands of persons walked, sat and sang together across the subcontinent to resist the destruction of an inclusive citizenship paradigm, as an opportunity to remember the legacies and fractures of the Constitution, the exhibition pivots the function of display from one of normative organization to urgent witnessing. In select works, the text, illustrations and fragments of the Constitution take the form of artistic material – recast, moulded, inscribed and erased to provide new meanings or revive forgotten principles.

In other works, the bodies and faces of thinkers, students and activists are placed in relation, relief, adjacency and closeness – provoking new associations as strangers in time become interlocutors partaking in the labour of mutinous imagination.

Hosted in the foyer of Jawahar Bhavan, the curator Aban Raza built interesting vertices of spatial and scopic relations between the artworks – installed upon and around false walls placed diagonally, creating a circuitous route for visitors to tread and opportunities for new lines of sight from varied locations. It is enriching to dwell on figures whose perlocution charges the body of the exhibition and the streets that surround it: Shaheen was the name of the male student shielded by young women (Ayesha Renna and Ladeeda Sakhaloon) in Jamia Millia Islamia when the police launched an unprovoked and unwarranted assault on the campus on 15 December 2019; an enduring image 106 | The Constitution of India at 70

of the protests which is displayed prominently in the exhibition is taken by Vinit Gupta, of a young Muslim man holding up the Constitution of India at Jantar Mantar. The image inspired Orijit Sen’s digital drawing Desh Premi, accompanied by a call to transform the year 2020 into a programme of understanding and enacting the values enshrined in the Constitution. In each of these instances there is a violence of denial enacted by the state which is in turn being refuted, rejected and countered through bodily courage and resolute assertion – we will not be dominated, we will not be defeated. These images hold affective power, but they also contain what Tina M. Campt calls practices of “fugitivity”, the ability to surpass the reductive cast of vulnerability, to a practice of refusal which “highlights the tense relations between acts of flight and escape, and creative practices of refusal – nimble and strategic practices that undermine the categories of the dominant”.7 Many of the works in the exhibition serve both a documentary purpose, of record and testimony, and a political purpose, depicting the work of organizing and leadership by minority and oppressed communities, bringing to the solemn silence of the exhibition space the clamour and vibration of protesting bodies, energies that are often institutionally stigmatized as erratic or unruly.

These include an image of a man in Ambedkar’s emblematic blue suit and red tie at Shaheen Bagh by Mahavir Singh Bisht, an image by Agneya Singh of anti-CAA protests. The fugitivity of these moments is the possibilities of solidarity they engender, evocative of the understanding of being Dalit which Suraj Yengde argues for: Dalit is an emancipatory category. It is a category and not a fixed terminology. Categories have a composite cosmos that have universal appeal. Dalit is not a subdued category. It is not subservient,

it is not helpless, it is not dying, and it is not problematizing the oppressor. Dalit is not confined to individual pasts, but it unites people who are oppressed under the casteist regimes. Thus, the appeal of Dalit is an appeal that could bring together the global oppressed.8 In the emergence of an iconography surrounding the figures of Dalit thinkers such as Ambedkar, Jyotiba and Savitribai Phule, Anand Teltumbde, many of whom appeared on posters and placards carried by protesters, the resilience of being Dalit as an experiential and epistemological challenge to oppressions is explored.

A subterranean undercurrent that flows through the exhibition is the recalcitrant thrust of the public: nearly every work situates itself in the common, shared spaces of communities and cities, statues, traffic signals, signposts, construction facades accompany groups and multitudes beyond the walls of their homes into streets and squares, underneath flyovers and in the lanes of public universities. In an image by Valay Singh of text graffitied on the wall of an army camp in Tengnoupal, Manipur, even boundaries of the state are haunted by the words of Giacomo Matteoti that declare the anti-fascist sentiment: “Liberty may make mistakes but tyranny is the death of a nation.” The challenging of frontiers, of instruments of division and exclusion, is a recurring practice in these works, where words are suffused with revolutionary import. Another work that performs this trans-historical citation is Aban Raza’s etching, If it cannot be justified, it should be dismantled, where the connecting points between the lines that comprise an alphabet are separated slightly – retaining just enough surface form to perform legibility, yet the breakage of the letters signals the tenor of Noam Chomsky’s words on authority and the “heavy burden

of justification” that must be its raison d’être: “If it cannot bear that burden – sometimes it can – then it is illegitimate and should be dismantled.”9 If the existence of any authority places a weight on the shoulders of anarchists and libertarians alike in Chomsky’s words, another work considers whether the strain of such a burden is still desirable over the “banality of evil” that is etched on to the body and soul of those that remain uncritical. In a graphic illustration by Mad Paule titled I will not be a rhinoceros, the moment of metastatic transfiguration in Eugène Ionesco’s play Rhinoceros is drenched in saffron, imaging what dominance demands of its perpetrators and enablers.

In these works, citation emerges as a tool for thinking through the veins of history, and constructing bridges across time and space through re/citation, the weaving of disparate contexts of fascism through the enunciation of the alert voices of revolution. In another set of works, the multitude is present and speaking.

Sameer Kulavoor’s Multiply Against Divisive Politics transforms the silhouettes, the territorial frontiers of the nation, into bodies that grow in numbers – retaining their differences in a move that is resonant of heterogeneous multiplication, not homogenous replication; in Kathyayini Dash’s The Emperor’s New Clothes, the crowd is not a silent spectator, but a watchful account-keeper of public conscience.

A crucial set of works turn the gaze on the body of the Constitution itself – dissecting organs and plates, illustrations and text, engaging in a dialectics of repetition and revocation, affirmation and rejection, to envision new horizons of meanings. In Pablo Bartholomew’s Gandhi Statue, Machlipatnam District, Andhra Pradesh, 1977 an iconic figure of India’s struggle for freedom and an advocate of civil disobedience

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108 | The Constitution of India at 70

as a moral praxis of the citizen stands ravaged and dilapidated as people look on – a haunting provocation for the sign of the times.

Achia Anzi’s Drawing Citizenship after Nandalal Bose revisits the illustrations accompanying the chapter on citizenship – a key tenet of the Constitution presently under onslaught. Anzi focuses on the figure of four ascetics, captured in the dimensions of a passport-size photograph – a technique that conjures notions of identification and mobility, legitimacy and legibility of human bodies that instruments such as passports contain. Lily Cho terms the passport a “document of suspicion” which separates the citizen from a feeling body: The injunction against emotion in the passport photograph projects the way in which the ideal citizen, in the eyes of the state, is an emotionally neutral one. Let me suggest that the photographs that identify us as citizens must be without emotion because they are themselves a vestigial reminder of the fraught relationship between emotion and citizenship.10 The use of the iconography of the ascetic, a body beyond material and temporal concerns, placed within the dimensions of a passport photograph amplify this vision of an apolitical citizen and undergirds the distribution of recognition on religious lines – a vision that is troubled by the emotive, contravening bodies and faces of protestors from the very religious groups which have been disenfranchised through the amendment of parameters for citizenship. In a powerful corollary, Ambedkar’s autobiographic short story, ‘Waiting for a Visa’, traces how untouchability operates and lodges itself in documents of assent and denial, mobility and entry; that the subjugation of residence, the very right to exist, to tools of permits

and renter discrimination are imbricated in the dominances of caste.

Arunkumar H.G.’s Celebrating the Constitution of India accomplishes the task of staging a ubiquitous circulation of the preamble to the Indian Constitution as a document of the commons – to be shared, celebrated, upheld, copied, distributed with freedom.

The preamble reappears in Rajinder Arora’s To be Indian and Vijay S. Jodha’s Unconstitutional and Constitutional.

The refrain, “We, the people of India” is superimposed on images of protest at Jamia by Ram Rahman, and the preamble is centred among images of protests in Vivan Sundaram’s Understanding the Preamble.

The choice to foreground the preamble, a document enlisting ideas which faced significant erasure in the call for discriminatory regimes of identification and citizenship, is also one which mirrors the placards and posters held by protestors – a strong thread that connects these works to the strategies used by protestors on the street, as much a homage to their reclamation of a foundational document, as a restatement of the public sentiment: the Constitution is ours.

It is also fascinating to consider what becomes of a document such as the preamble to the Indian Constitution, which is not legal in the strictest sense of enforceability but is seen to function more as a spring well – a determinative but not exhaustive source. In its use as an artistic medium and as an artistic form, many passages are at play – the boundary between what is processual and what is presented is obfuscated; the guiding and enframing functions of a document seen to be under siege is resurrected; the artists seem to be suggesting that the nation is a river which has gone astray from its path, that it needs to be reminded of its origin and confluential form. In such gestures, The Constitution of India at 70 | 109

it is useful to think of Appadurai’s contention: “art is a momentary assemblage of mobile persons and things and that art objects, assemblages, events, and performances vary only in the intensity of their interest in denying or celebrating the social trajectory to which all things are subject”.11 The effacement of the body of the Constitution through laws and strategies that circumvent the foundational precepts of secularism and democracy is powerfully juxtaposed with the mutilation of the resisting body – while the words from the preamble can be repeated and restated, the skin and tissues of those lost to state occupation in Kashmir bear witness to the faultlines of this Constitution, and relate the story of a suppression that has been relentless. In the works of photojournalist Sanna Irshad Mattoo, the questions of spaces of exception, where law is suspended or operates as a feint, and the psychic and somatic residues of assault probe us to refute the politics of “grievable bodies”, and simultaneously imagine “the conditions under which it becomes possible to apprehend a life or set of lives as precarious, and those that make it less possible, or indeed impossible”.12 These are images of bodies that have borne attacks, bodies that have stood witness, and which are contending with the dispensability of their lives, with acute loss and sustained trauma. María Lucila Pelento notes that such bodies do not have recourse to ordinary psychic routes of healing as even the rituals of mourning are withheld, “on the one hand by the State depriving citizens of the most essential of protections, such as the right to life, to be informed, the right to take care of the remains in case of death, and also by the Rule of Law being suspended in the social sphere”.13 In bringing this palimpsest to a close, it is helpful to consider a figure who became a symbol that 110 | The Constitution of India at 70

reverberated across the globe: Ambedkar as an icon, as an exemplar, as a thinker-actor, an artist, and a people.

The proliferation of the image of Ambedkar across sites of protests was in no part less than a relocation of his personhood from the wrenches of a state, which has repeatedly sought to deify his biography in the hope to divest it of its critical potential, to squarely among the protesting public. In an essay titled ‘Ambedkar, Ambedkarites and Ambedkarism: From Panther to Saffron Slave’, Anand Teltumbde traces the trajectory of this shift in the Indian state’s capture of his life and the reduction of his voice to one of an “inert godhead”: “It is one thing to revere a hero and quite another to approach him as pilgrims do god, particularly when the hero had curtly warned against his deification.”14 Though the words, ideas and figure of Ambedkar are present in many works, two provide us ways to think of the philosophical and political legacies of thought and their application to present-day politics. In Simar Puneet’s Vehicle of Life, a collage of images of protests is arranged to form the figure of Ambedkar, and in Sourav Brahmachari’s Bhim Power No. 1, Ambedkar’s words on constitutional morality are etched on his face.

In both these works we see the possibility of reading Ambedkar as Yengde does, as “someone who gave us a framework of being critical, and that is why we have to be critical of him too so that we can have more of Ambedkar rather than less of him”.15 In Guru Charan Murmu’s I am black but, I am not a buffalo, the inability of radical political thinkers to contend with the social truth and moral worth of Adivasi lives is explored through the powerful visual code of skin colour and cattle, what are seen as sub-human denominations. The space of educational institutions where discrimination on grounds of caste and colour are enforced and reproduced, the lack of contention with the everyday humiliation of persons belonging to Scheduled Castes

and Tribes, is captured in this statement, and has been recorded by activist-scholars such as Maroona Murmu as a rampant and continuing reality.16 In Deepani Seth’s Temple Entry, the death of Aniket Ambhore, a student of electrical engineering at IIT Bombay, who was routinely harassed and bullied as a member of a Scheduled Caste, is told through newspaper clippings and images arranged as intricate collages that portray the pernicious seepage of discrimination into daily life, and chart the history of upper-caste antagonisms and gate-keeping through their opposition to key policies for inclusive reformation of the educational sector.

Writing about the various sounds of the Tahrir Square protest, Ziad Fahmy warns us against producing “soundproof, devocalized narratives of the past”.17 It is necessary then to think of the singing and sloganeering, the sounds of dancing and marching, feet treading ground – together, discordant, euphoric – in protests and in classrooms, a joyful sound that reverberated with the clarity of the certitude that a nation is its people; its people are porous; and porosity is not simply affinity but the fullness of belonging.

These were truths embodied in the resilience of the women of Shaheen Bagh, and the womxn, trans and queer voices that led and drove the impetus of this reckoning with the state. A gauntlet was throttled – not just of patriarchal state domination, but of the social and interpersonal structures of oppression and its arbiters as well. In Arshi Ahmadzai’s Na-Shanas, the figure of a woman rises above guns, and in a gendered subversion, the lyrics of Mirza Ghalib’s couplet, “na thā kuchh to ḳhudā thā kuchh na hotā to ḳhudā hotā”, are changed such that god assumes a female form. Seeing the people sitting in the Bagh and womxn leading the vanguard of protests – many of whom braved the cold with their children and other dependants, who added questioning the state to the multiple shifts the

vulnerable pull in the course of a day, and who infused an ethics of resilience and steadfast refusal into the vocabularies of the persons who joined them – it is possible to see Ahmadzai’s embroidered motifs as subversive as well as documentarian.

It is appropriate to end this rumination with a confession: the performance of thinking and writing, seen often as an activity that is remote or at odds with the collective, itself was fundamentally altered in the course of producing this essay. As voices singing together rose in videos of the computer screen, as images were found on phone albums and amidst groups of friends, as old associations were reached out to and remarkable stories of courage read, the continuing mandates of the struggle, its present iterations and future forms appeared as not a distant idea but an ongoing reality, one that evinces feeling and fraternity, that breaks down notions of language as a barrier and rebuilds it as an opening, an invitation to join – the humming and rising of a song that continues. In a poignant work that served as a quiet lynchpin in the exhibition, Gopa Trivedi references a poem by Pash that has a simple, self-evident refrain: I am grass. I will grow upon everything you do. No destruction is final, no declaration absolute. Like blades of grass, we rise – as lumps in our throats give way to music and as our feet rise from their shackles to a vigorous rhythm. To take a small liberty with Pash: We are grass. We will grow upon everything you do.

eSa ?kkl gw¡ eSa vkids gj fd,&/kjs ij mx vkÅ¡xk ce Qsad nks pkgs fo”ofo|ky; ij cuk nks gksL‍Vy dks eycs dk <sj lqgkxk fQjk nks Hkys gh gekjh >ksifM+;ksa ij The Constitution of India at 70 | 111

esjk D‍;k djksxs eSa rks ?kkl gw¡ gj pht ij mx vkÅ¡xk caxs dks <sj dj nks lax:j feVk Mkyks /kwy esa feyk nks yqf/k;kuk ftyk esjh gfj;kyh viuk dke djsxh--nks lky--- nl lky ckn lokfj;k¡ fQj fdlh daMD‍Vj ls iwNsaxh ;g dkSu&lh txg gS eq>s cjukyk mrkj nsuk tgk¡ gjs ?kkl dk taxy gS

Oliver Marchart, Conflictual Aesthetics, Artistic Activism and the Public Sphere, Sternberg Press, 2019, p. 12.

6

Tina M. Campt, Listening to Images, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017, p. 32.

7

Suraj Yengde in conversation with Shaunna Rodrigues, ‘Dalit is the New Political and Epistemic Horizon: An Interview with Suraj Yengde’, Borderlines, 23 November 2020, https://www.borderlinescssaame.org/posts/2020/11/23/dalit-is-the-new-political-andepistemic-horizon-an-interview-with-suraj-yengde 8

Noam Chomsky, Powers and Prospects: Reflections on Human Nature and Social Order, London: Pluto Press, 1996, p. 73. Variations of this quote appear throughout Chomsky’s writings, most notably in Democracy and Power: Chomsky in India (Open Edition Books).

9

Lily Cho, ‘Citizenship, Diaspora and the Bonds of Affect: The Passport Photograph’, Photography and Culture, 2, 2009, p. 276.

10

eSa ?kkl gw¡] eSa viuk dke d:¡xk eSa vkids gj fd,&/kjs ij mx vkÅ¡xk A

Arjun Appadurai, ‘The Thing Itself’, Public Culture, 18, Duke University Press, 2006, p. 16.

11

Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2009, p. 2.

12

María Lucila Pelento, ‘Mourning for “missing” people’, in On Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia, edited by Thierry Bokanowski, London: Routledge, 2018, p. 60.

13

Anand Teltumbde, ‘Ambedkar, Ambedkarites and Ambedkarism: From Panther to Saffron Slave’, in Republic of Caste, New Delhi: Navayana Publishing, 2018, p. 118.

14

The title is drawn from a quote by Rehana Khatun to N. Masih, in N. Masih, ‘India’s First-time Protesters: Mothers and Grandmothers Stage Weeks-long Sit-in against Citizenship Law’, The Washington Post, New Delhi, 13 January 2020; available at https://www. washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/indiasfirst-timeprotesters-mothers-and-grandmothers-stage-weeks-long-sit-inagainstcitizenship-law/2020/01/12/431ae9c6-30d5-11ea-971b43bec3ff9860_story.html 1

Aishwary Kumar, ‘Introduction’, in Soumyabrata Choudhury, Ambedkar and Other Immortals: An Untouchable Research Programme, New Delhi: Navayana Publishing, 2018, p. 13.

2

Mirza Waheed, ‘Under Siege: Mirza Waheed on Kashmir’, Literary Hub, 10 September 2019, https://lithub.com/under-siege-mirzawaheed-on-kashmir/ 3

Suraj Yengde in conversation with Shaunna Rodrigues, ‘Dalit is the New Political and Epistemic Horizon’.

15

Maroona Murmu in conversation with Arunima Kar, ‘They reduce me to a “meritless” Adivasi: Maroona Murmu, Jadavpur associate professor’, Caravan Magazine, 10 September 2020, https:// caravanmagazine.in/interview/maroona-murmu-adivasi-associateprofessor-on-facing-discrimination 16

Ziad Fahmy, ‘’Coming to our Senses: Historicizing Sound and Noise in the Middle East’, History Compass, 11:4, 2013, p. 306.

17

The Sahmat Collective: Art and Activism in India since 1989, edited by Jessica Moss and Ram Rahman, Chicago: Smart Museum of Art and University of Chicago Press, 2013, p. 96.

4

Geeta Kapur, “Secular Artist–Citizen Artist”, in The Sahmat Collective, edited by Jessica Moss and Ram Rahman, p. 271.

5

112 | The Constitution of India at 70

Arushi Vats is a writer based in Delhi. She works as editorial manager at an arts foundation.

Index of artworks ABAN RAZA

29

JYOTHIDAS K.V.

54

RISHABH ARORA

79

ACHIA ANZI

30

KATHYAYINI DASH

55

RONI BACHAR

56

ADIL KALIM

31

KAUSAR JAHAN

56

SAJEEV VISWESWARAN

80

AGNEYA SINGH

32

KHANDAKAR OHIDA

57

SALIK ANSARI

83

AMEER HAMZA

83

KHURSHEED AHMAD

58

SAMEER KULAVOOR

84

ANITA DUBE

33

MAD PAULE

60

SAMIT DAS

85

ANITA KHEMKA

34

MOHD ZAKI AFSAR

56

SANNA IRSHAD MATTOO

86

IMRAN KOKILOO

34

MAHAVIR SINGH BISHT

61

SATWINDER KAUR

88

ANUPAM ROY

35

MAHULA GHOSH

62

SHASHIKANT

89

ARPANA CAUR

36

MEGHA MADAN

63

SHIVANGI SINGH

90

ARSHI IRSHAD AHMADZAI

37

MITHU SEN

64

SIMAR PUNEET

91

ARUNKUMAR H.G.

38

MUJTABA RIZVI

65

SOURAV BRAHMACHARI

92

BIRENDER YADAV

39

NALINI MALANI

66

SUMEDH RAJENDRAN

93

CHANDAN GOMES

40

NAVJOT ALTAF

67

TSERING NEGI

94

DEBASIS

41

NEERAJ SINGH KHANDKA

68

VALAY SINGH

95

DEEPANI SETH

42

NEHA GREWAL

69

VIBIN GEORGE

96

DHRUBAJIT SARMA

44

NILIMA SHEIKH

70

VIJAY S. JODHA

97

DINU MONDAL

56

ORIJIT SEN

71

VINIT GUPTA

98

DIVYA SINGH

45

PABLO BARTHOLOMEW

72

VISHAL KUMAR

99

GARGI RAINA

46

PARTHIV SHAH

73

VIVAN SUNDARAM

GARIMA GUPTA

47

PREETI SINGH

74

GIGI SCARIA

48

PROBIR GUPTA

75

GOPA

50

PUSHPAMALA N.

76

GURU CHARAN MURMU

52

RAJINDER ARORA

77

JAHANGIR JANI

53

RAM RAHMAN

78

100

The Constitution of India at 70 | 113

114 | The Constitution of India at 70