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Review of The Transformative Constitution and Sixteen Stormy Days | Aakash Singh Rathore
In Review of Gautam Bhatia’s The Transformative Constitution and Tripurdaman Singh’s Sixteen Stormy Days, Aakash Singh Rathore tries to understand what makes the Constitution and the modern principles of justice sacred by trying to contrast Tripurdaman Singh’s Sixteen Stormy Days: The Story of the First Amendment to the Constitution of India and Gautam Bhatia’s The Transformative Constitution: A Radical Biography in Nine Acts. The author first analyses Sixteen Stormy Days which traces the politico-socio-legal background of the incidents leading up to the first amendment of the nascent Constitution of India, within sixteen months after coming into existence. The author is highly critical of Singh’s book and its depiction of Jawaharlal Nehru and its failure to capture the different motivations and interests of the several cabinet members who supported Nehru’s amendment. However, praise is reserved for recounting the events unfolding in 1950 and early 1951 elegantly. The author contrasts this with Bhatia’s Transformative Constitution, which recognizes the Indian Constitution as an embodiment of India’s destiny to break free from the linear continuity of political order from the past, which has been illustrated through the course of nine significant judgments under the theme of equality, liberty and fraternity. The author notes that, unlike Singh, Bhatia does not believe that the Indian liberal democracy was dead on arrival. Instead, the constitutional essentials upon which our Republic was founded are ready to be reanimated.
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