Starting with the origins of democracy in Athens and referring to the writings of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, Padmanabhan reviews the broad sweep of the history of the Constitution of India, focussing on ‘procedural versus substantive’ democracy, concluding that “the Indian Constitution became the crucible of negotiation and contestation between antinomic interpretations of the Indian democratic experiment”.

In an attempt to “outline the ways Indian democracy has shaped and reshaped itself in the last six decades, in the light of the Indian republic’s theoretical foundations, institutional mechanisms and certain kinds of political processes”, the editors have got 13 contributors to write essays on different facets of Indian democracy. Major political parties seem to do this very often….”

It is this thought that the editors of the book, Arvind Sivaramakrishnan and Sudarsan Padmanabhan, express when they write, “Almost inevitably in democracies, strong tendencies occasionally emerge which in effect reduce democracy to electoral politics as the only form of political activity. While there seems broad agreement about Brazil, the Philippines, and Turkey being erstwhile democracies moving progressively away from democratic principles, even India, the UK, and the US are widely considered to be on a similar path.

Ambedkar by Salim Yusufji