This Long Essay Makes An Eloquent And Persuasive Argument For Nehru'S Idea Of Nationhood In India. At A Time When The Relevance Of Nehru'S Vision Is Under Scrutiny, This Book Assumes A Special Significance.

The book The Idea of Being Indians and the Making of India is a must read for all Indians. It informs them why India is a colony of its middle class who keeps the 80 percent of the population out of the benefits of all economic planning and development. The answer is that the struggle for Indias freedom was waged by its middle-class leaders only to drive the British out of power and not to get rid of the feudal-fascist governance structures of administration, judiciary, and police, which were crushing us, according to Nehrus admission in his book The Discovery of India. These crushing structures, our leaders themselves took over and had the taste of the power and pelf that flowed, and their feast still continues while the nation gets the human development ranking at 136 among 187 nations, according the latest Human Development Report released by the UNDP in March 2013. The book narrates in lucid language that the noble and highly egalitarian missions of the Indian Republic, contained in the Preamble to the Constitution of India, could not be translated into experiential comforts for people of this country only because they were not compatible with the feudal-fascist revenue-collection-oriented structures inherited from the British. The book argues that when leaders who, after making a set of highly republican and democratically oriented development objectives for their country, adopt them as the Preamble to the Constitution of India instead of creating relevant democratic republican governance structures to implement, they deliberately pick up the regressive feudal-fascist governance structures used by the colonial government for their selfish ends. It is tantamount not only to a political scam but to a spiritual one. The author gives a twelve-point sarvodaya good governance model' as remedy to these strategic errors of our founding fathers and for making a resurgent India with the help of the mission statements of the Indian Republic enshrined in the Preamble to the Constitution of India. The author argues that the mission statements in the Preamble to the Constitution of India contain the idea of being Indians of a healthy, prosperous, and peaceful society at total or 100 percent population level. The making of India of such a society is in the hands of the people of India, especially the youth.

This volume is a theoretico-empirical study of nations and nationalism on a global scale. It enquires if the idea of the nation, by its own logic, is feasible and whether India fulfils the requirement of nationhood with a reasonable prospect of survival. The monograph engages with the theories of nation and nationalism and examines if they are relevant and tenable in contemporary times. It looks at the way these ideas have acted out in the Indian nation while attempting to map its future trajectory. It also asks: how do the two fundamental challenges to the idea of nation – ethnicity and class – fare in the era of globalisation; and further, how does India, a new state in an ancient society, reconceptualise the paradigm of this debate? The book will be of great interest to scholars and students of political science, political theory, history, political philosophy, and South Asian studies, as well as informed general readers.

A constitutional lawyer and scholar holds forth on the Constitution and the idea of India, at a point in time when both are in the throes of being reinvented beyond recognition. Does the Constitution represent an ethos of the people of India that is equitable, emancipatory and evolving? Is it a sturdy foundation for the socio-political bastion of a nation to imagine itself upon? Has it yielded sufficient returns to justify an absolute faith in constitutionalism as a blueprint for an India of the future? Have courts and lawyers stayed true to its sublime promises? The text of this lecture delivered on invitation of the General K S Thimayya Memorial Trust knits together historical, political and institutional underpinnings of the Constitution to argue that this paramount law of the land ought to guide us in our steps ahead as a nation. The lecture draws on threads from Sufi poetry and Persian literature on the one hand, to case law and personal experience on from the practice of law on the other, to build a case for an idea of India that is just, secular and fortified by the highest principles of constitutional morality.