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Constitutions and their foundational discontents: Studying the process of constitution-making in Jammu and Kashmir

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 June 2023

Rouf Ahmad Dar Open the ORCID record for Rouf Ahmad Dar [Opens in a new window]
Rouf Ahmad Dar*
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Kashmir, Hazratbal, Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, India 190001
*
Email: roufdar1191@gmail.com
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Abstract

This article studies the process of constitution-making in Jammu and Kashmir as a hegemonic process dominated by, and an ideological reflection of, the dominant political party of Jammu and Kashmir, the National Conference led by the popular leader Sheikh Abdullah. The Constitution of Jammu and Kashmir emerged as an outcome of their ideas. Though the process itself was punctuated by the exclusionary violence against diverse communities present in the state at that time, very little attention has been paid to the idea of a constitution as an exclusivist text that embeds ‘foundational violence’ within it, and that eliminates dissenting groups and prevents the inclusion of plural conceptions of politics by actualizing a monopolistic discourse in favour of the dominant party. This article locates the violence that went into constitution-making and further employs hermeneutical interpretation of the Constituent Assembly Debates of Jammu and Kashmir to locate the differing viewpoints that existed in the State Constituent Assembly. It also takes the surrounding political and ideological context into account. In doing so, it constructs an alternative and ‘unofficial’ version of the constitution-making process, which helps challenge the dominant historical narrative that the constitution-making in Jammu and Kashmir was a successful experiment in Indian federal democracy.

Keywords

ConflictconstitutionalismexclusionJammu and Kashmirviolence
Type
Research Article
Information
Global Constitutionalism , Volume 12 , Issue 3 , November 2023 , pp. 543 - 561
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press

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