SWARAJ IN IDEAS:COMPARING CONSTITUTIONS FROM A SOUTHASIAN PERSPECTIVE

“Winds of the World, give answer! They are whimpering to and fro-
And what should they know of England who only England know?”2
Rudyard Kipling, in these lines tries to convey that if one wishes to know England one should
know what is ‘NOT’ England and one who knows ‘ONLY’ England doesn’t know England at all. This
is very true in our context of comparative constitutional studies as well and an analogy can be drawn.
The basic premise of indulging in a comparative constitutional exercise in my opinion emanates from
the very principle of “inevitability” and also that of “necessity”. The fact that we live in a globalized
world and cannot literally afford to remain oblivious of other developments around the world drives
us to look beyond our own territories, our own cocoons and shells and hence reflect, introspect and
finally implement for the betterment of our society at large.
Ran Hirschl calls Comparative constitutional encounters as much a humanist and socio-political
phenomenon as they are a juridical one. Hirschl says that, convergence, resistance, and selective
engagement with the constitutive laws of others, past and present, reflect broader tensions between
particularism and universalism, and mirror struggles over competing visions of who “we” are, and
who we wish to be as a political community.3 He identifies this exercise as an interplay between the
core factors of necessity, inquisitiveness, and politics in advancing comparative engagement with
the constitutive laws of others through the ages. The question of “Who we are” is more or less settled,
but “who we wish to become” as a political community is a highly subjective and driven by various
factors of history, subjugation, polity, social challenges and compulsions in a State.
South Asia has its own distinct history, culture, politics and sociology, different from the West,
but still, this Eastern part of the globe like the rest has usually been identified as a passive consumer
of Western ideas, concepts and models, as if surviving the white man’s burden as legal heirs. The
tendency in South Asia has always been of borrowing from the West rather than looking for something
from within. This may probably be an outcome of the colonialisation of these countries and that they
still suffer from that ‘Colonial Hangover’ wherein their own ideas are still hegemonized by the so
called ‘superior’ Western Thought pushing their own ideas and beliefs to a back seat. This is nothing
but an inferiority complex idealised, institutionalised, legalised and normalised.