This conversation will address the crisis in the concept of constitutional identity, a concept which has been subtly articulated by Gary J Jacobsohn. Conceiving ‘crisis’ as ‘disharmonies’, he speaks of constitutional ‘identity’ in a dialectical relation as a culturally embedded core of varied practices of identification. The preliminary issue is whether, and how, the national and constitutional identity coincide. Second, we consider the matter of identity entrepreneurs and, third, examine the thesis of ‘abuse of constitutional identity’ and the dialectics of robustness and fragility of/in the identity of constitution. Finally, we attend briefly to some questions of related concerns raised by the distinction between ‘We, the people’ and ‘We, the nations’, in relation to the notions of identity.

When Charles de Gaulle learned that France’s former colonies in Africa had chosen independence, the General shrugged dismissively: ‘[t]hey are the dust of empire’. This disdain toward the non-Euro others characterised as Eurocentrism is typical of, and almost defines approaches to, the post-Westphalian order. This disdain is naturalised in the early era of what I have elsewhere called ‘conquest colonisation’, where resources, territories, nations and even people are plundered and looted, and governance by predation and the politics of discrimination prevail. Paradigmatically, conquest globalisation engages in ruthless subjugation of peoples marked by the altogether resolute denial of their humanity and confiscation of their natural habitat, social relations and human resources. At times, it even entails the total physical destruction of peoples, or cultural destruction, as the histories of indigenous peoples everywhere testify. Conquest globalisation founds itself on, and takes pride in, reiterating and calibrating various forms of production of human rightlessness of the subjugated peoples.

No society or state will ever eliminate corruption but that is no argument against confronting or combating this practice. The dream of corruption-free society is always important as articulating discontent with systemic governance corruption (SGC, as I call it) and reinforcing moral crusades against it. However, the nightmare of corruption haunts millions of Indians. Obviously, for each generation, the important task is to devise strategies for controlling corrupt conduct.

The threshold difficulty, however, dwells in the very word ‘corruption’. Its social and juristic meanings do not always coincide. There are other allied words such as ‘bribery’, ‘nepotism’ and ‘ethnoclientism’. Difference among them is not just an affair of idiosyncrasy in style; it often reflects conceptual confusion as well as a matter of elegant toleration. The authors of this work do well to mediate on many of these differences and they remain entirely right in the view that systemic corruption is the tendency and conduct to use public office for private gain.

The learned authors of this thought-provoking work supplement their scholarship with the vigor of experience and imagination shaped by considerable amount of intense policing work. This is an infrequent occurrence, as work on corruption remains generally the preserve of social scientists and legal academics. It is puzzling that while corruption in public life is monumental, work on its amelioration is scattered and sporadic. In this respect as well, the learned authors make a substantial contribution to the sparse literature.

They are clear that mega institutional frameworks will not work; what are needed are organizational and institutional settings in which daily corruption may be confronted by and on behalf of citizens in meso- and micro-level settings. Despite their unconcealed enthusiasm for the India Against Corruption movement led by Anna Hazare, the authors maintain that such arrangements may lead to a possible diminishing of democracy. They unequivocally write: ‘We also raise a red flag over the creation of an all-powerful enforcement agency in the country. An empowered, resource rich and independent police agency, though effective in combating corruption can also be a threat to democracy and open society.’ A principal merit of this work lies precisely in the difficult reconciliation of democracy with the first principles of combatting corruption.

While the makers of the Indian Constitution rather acutely anticipated the notion of ‘human dignity as empowerment’ (Beyleveld and Brownsword 2001), it is no simple task to understand the precise place of human dignity within the constitutional scheme. Moreover, for a variety of reasons, grasping the ways in which dignity as empowerment has been put to work in the sixty-plus years of the Indian Constitution remains an even more hazardous narrative.

First, India's sixty-year-long freedom struggle was premised on the idea that sustained colonial predation and subjugation constituted an epic saga of humiliation – the Other of dignity. This Indian struggle for freedom, together with the Constitution that it eventually produced, offers a becoming and befitting response to the contemporary and ahistoric ‘digcrits’ discourse (questioning the conceptual and normative coherence of human dignity as well as its institutional viability).

Second, the freedom movement also generates a new telos of dignity for the subjects of violent social exclusion constituted by the discursive formations of the Hindu Dharma that disacknowledged moral capacity and legal subjectivity to India’s millennially humiliated peoples – the Untouchables, the indigenous peoples, and in a related yet distinct sense the masses of Indian women.