Indeed, the publication of India’s Founding Moment coincided with a period of unprecedented strain for India’s constitutional democracy. Nonetheless, the subtitle of India’s Founding Moment- The Constitution of a Most Surprising Democracy-implies that Khosla draws a connection between the ideas that shaped the creation of constitutional democracy in India and its endurance.
Why it has endured is a question answered by “historical studies of India’s postcolonial life” (18) and scholarship in political science that has “investigated the inexplicable survival of Indian democracy” (18) in the absence of the cultural, economic, and social preconditions prevailing in Western Europe and North America, i.e., “the missing foundations on which self-government was widely thought to be predicated” (3) as well as the historical sequencing of constitutionalism followed by democracy through the gradual expansion of the suffrage. His concern is not “with the working of Indian democracy” but “rather … the decision to be democratic.” India’s poverty, illiteracy, and staggering diversity-combined with the necessity of adopting both constitutionalism and democracy simultaneously and instantaneously-made the success of constitutional democracy extremely unlikely. As Khosla puts it, India’s Founding Moment is “a study of certain traditions of thought about democracy and constitutionalism at the moment of India’s creation” (at 24)-that is, “the founding approach toward democratization” (19).
Madhav Khosla’s brilliant book, India’s Founding Moment, is self-consciously a work on the history of ideas.
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