For some time now I’ve been wanting to work on a book called “constitutional Indians” – a concept that I have briefly touched upon in the c...
For some time now I’ve been wanting to work on a book called “constitutional Indians” – a concept that I have briefly touched upon in the conclusion of my book Christianity and Politics in Tribal India: Baptist Missionaries and Naga Nationalism, which has just published by Permanent Black and Ashoka University in collaboration with the New India Foundation.
My argument in it is that, for a putatively renegade ethnic community like the Nagas, the “idea of India” hangs precariously in the balance, supported by a piece of paper, the Indian Constitution, which we have until recently understood as a guarantee of equal rights to Indian citizens irrespective of religion, ethnicity, class, and gender.
I belong to an emerging class of educated Nagas who consider themselves “constitutional Indians”; many of the young in my community, and perhaps the North East more broadly, are culturally conservative, proud of their region’s distinctive history, tradition, language, and ethnic identity, but at the same time seeing and desiring common ground with fellow citizens in other regions of the country that have their own – sometimes almost incomprehensibly different – language, history, and culture.
For a Naga, this common ground is the idea of a modern and secular India – as the truly Ambedkar-inspired Constitution...
