Pluralist Agreement and Constitutional Transformation (PACT)

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Democracy and pluralism are in crisis today, as authoritarianism extends its grip over countries once celebrated as democratic successes. With populist leaders pursuing a divisive nationalism that violates the rule of law, constitutions have increasingly become rallying points in citizen protests against state violence. At the same time, new research is emerging on constitution-making in divided societies. However, scholars have mostly focussed on cases from the global North (notably the US, Europe), and on the role of founding fathers, often privileged men. The role of collective practices of petition, debate and protest by ordinary citizens and the marginalized in the making of constitutions, and their remaking over time, remains largely invisible. At the same time, constitutional knowledge and engagement remain largely the preserve of scholars and legal experts, at a distance from the lived experiences of violence and exclusion that animate popular appeals to constitutions. PACT steps into this breach. A ground-breaking multi-disciplinary research collaboration PACT will create an advanced digital platform on the making of the Indian constitution (1950), one of the most influential in the global South, currently under threat from the Hindu Right. The Indian Constituent Assembly (1946-49) met against the background of a transfer of power from British rule, Partition, Hindu-Muslim blood-shed, and the largest mass migration in history. Despite these formidable challenges, as well as deep disagreement among members from diverse religious, caste and linguistic groups, it came to successfully agree on a constitutional text, unlike many others. As recent visual images of protestors reading the constitutional preamble attest, the constitution continues to occupy a salient position in contemporary politics as we approach the 75th anniversary of Indian independence (2022). Our research will aim to draw lessons regarding the democratic legitimacy of constitutions from the Indian example, while analysing its unfulfilled potential for pluralism in the present. The PACT platform, a free, open-access digital database that will be a lasting legacy of the project, will link Indian debates to those on the American founding, enabling researchers as well as public users to access and compare constitutional debates across national boundaries in new ways. PACT will generate a wealth of new knowledge on constitution-making in India, contextualizing the plenary debates for the first time in relation to committee discussions as well as petitions, public responses and wider debate of the period. We seek to uncover forgotten histories of constitutional rights, bringing in marginal voices of representatives of Dalits, Muslim and women. We will deploy the digital platform to examine the relationship between procedures and outcomes in the Constituent Assembly, in particular with regard to the protection of individual rights and group difference along lines of religion, caste, and tribe. Together with our collaborating organization in India, PACT will conduct workshops using our digital platform to activate engagement with the constitution and to elicit meanings of rights for diverse citizens, including parliamentarians, lawyers, journalists, teachers and students. We will work with creative artists to explore story-telling in the form of comic strips and short films on the making of the Indian Constitution, to be deployed to explore constitutional engagement among citizens from rural backgrounds with limited literacy and digital access. These will also form part of the summative exhibition and conference in London to launch the PACT research platform in 2025 (75th anniversary of the constitution). We seek thereby to address the AHRC's mission of demonstrating the centrality of humanities and arts for activating civic engagement for tackling key global problems of our time.