NCERT Solutions Exploring Society: India and Beyond Chapter 10 End-of-chapter exercise — Questions and activities

Because the Constitution had to work for the whole of India, and only people who know a region's life can speak for it. The chapter notes that the members “represented India's diverse regions, professions, and social groups”, and that of the 299 members, 15 were women.

Four reasons a diverse Assembly mattered:

• No region's needs would be forgotten. A hill State, a coastal district, a desert region and a dense city do not face the same problems. Members from each could say so while the rules were still being written.
• No group would be left out of the rights. Women, farmers, workers, lawyers, teachers and members of communities that had long been treated unfairly were all in the room when equality and non-discrimination were being framed.
• The document would be accepted. People obey a rulebook they helped write. A Constitution drafted by a narrow group would have been seen as one group's law imposed on everyone else.
• Better decisions. Different points of view test each other. Dr. Rajendra Prasad said democratic institutions need “willingness to respect the viewpoint of others, capacity for compromise and accommodation” — that begins with having different viewpoints present.

Match each statement to the feature it shows:

The honest answer has two parts, and a good response gives both: in law it is a fact; in daily practice it is still being worked towards.

How to formulate your own argument. State your position in one sentence, give two pieces of evidence, then answer the strongest objection to your view. For example: “Equality before the law is a fact in the sense that matters most — the law itself makes no distinction between citizens and every citizen can go to court. But a right on paper becomes real only when people know it and can reach a court easily, so the task now is to close the gap between the promise and everyday experience.”

India did it because anything less would have contradicted the freedom struggle it had just won. The chapter records that one of the questions the framers set themselves was: “How do we make sure that every adult citizen has a right to vote?” — and the electoral system was then laid down so that every eligible citizen is enabled to vote.

The reasons, laid out:

• The freedom movement had been a mass movement. Farmers, workers, women and students had all taken part. It would have been indefensible to tell them, once freedom came, that only the rich or the educated could vote.
• The Constitution rests on equality. If all are equal before the law, votes cannot be handed out by caste, gender, wealth or literacy. Universal franchise is simply equality applied to elections.
• Colonial rule had denied Indians a say. The obvious opposite of being governed without consent is everyone getting a say.
• ‘WE, THE PEOPLE OF INDIA’. The Preamble says the Constitution was drawn up and enacted by the people through their representatives. Representatives can only speak for the people if all the people choose them.
• Trust in ordinary Indians. Many observers at the time thought a poor and largely unlettered country could not manage a full franchise. The framers disagreed — they judged that the right to be governed by consent does not depend on schooling or income.

The freedom struggle shaped the Constitution in two ways — through its ideals and through its practical lessons.

• Ideals. The chapter lists them: equality of all, justice for all, freedom, fraternity, preservation of India's cultural heritage — and the idea of using the Constitution itself as a tool and a means of achieving those ideals. Those are exactly the words that reappear in the Preamble.
• People. A number of leaders of the freedom movement were members of the Constituent Assembly, so they “carried their experience and ideas from the freedom struggle to the Constitution”. The Constitution was, as the chapter puts it, the cornerstone for an independent India.
• Practical answers. The experience of the struggle answered the ‘how’ and ‘what’ questions — the vote for every adult citizen, the separation of the powers of executive, legislature and judiciary, the guarantee of fundamental rights, the procedure for amendment, and the Centre–State relationship.

India's civilisational heritage shaped it in three ways:

The framers also looked outward, in the spirit of ā no bhadrāh kratavo yantu viśhwatah, “Let noble thoughts come to me from every side”: ‘liberty, equality, fraternity’ from France, the Directive Principles from Ireland, the independent judiciary from the USA.

Not all of them, not yet — and the Constitution never assumed we would have. Its own design says so: Fundamental Rights are “promises that must be kept” and can be claimed today, while the Directive Principles are “bigger goals that might take time to achieve as our country progressed”. Several of those goals — a good standard of living for everyone (Article 47), social, political and economic justice (Article 38), the protection of the environment (Article 48-A) — are still being worked towards.

At the same time, a great deal has been achieved: every adult votes, governments change peacefully by election, courts strike down laws that break the Constitution, education is a right, and untouchability and discrimination are unlawful.

What each of us can do — small, real things, matched to the values:

Here is the completed crossword. Count the squares in the grid to check each answer as you fill it in.