Constitution of India

The Indian federal structure is largely symmetric albeit with some asymmetric features. An attempt is made to locate union territories as a distinct unit of the Indian federation in the context of asymmetrical federalism, and their status is examined through the principle of weighted and differentiated equality in India. There has been an attempt to accommodate diversity in India through asymmetrical provision of power sharing between states. The establishment of union territories has also followed this principle of asymmetry—justified by their unique context and origin—as seen in the distinctive powers of the union territories of Delhi, Chandigarh, Puducherry, and Jammu and Kashmir.

The issue of the national language was one of the most contentious and passionately debated ones by members of the Constituent Assembly. The significance of this debate lies in the way the members imagined India as a nation, articulated regional and linguistic identities, and sought to build unity of purpose to lay the foundations of modern India. The debates revealed a divide between North and South India, and took on communal undertones too. The eventual choice of Hindi could be pushed through due to the numerical strength of the supporters of the language. This paper will unravel the varying standpoints of participants in this debate.

The Indian language policy is informed by a pull towards unilingual identity, inspired by the European model of nation state that is predicated on the homogeneity of its people. Language hegemony works at two tiers in India—at the state and the centre. The Constitution fails to pay more than lip service to the linguistic plurality and multilingual ethos of the peoples of India and has created a chaturvarna (four-tier order) of languages, with Sanskrit, Hindi, the scheduled, and the non-scheduled languages occupying various rungs of the ladder. English—the language of the conquerors—being outside the chaturvarna system has emancipatory potential.

India's Constitution has been amended over a hundred times since its inception in 1950. The landmark amendments are discussed with special emphasis on the first amendment, which altered the way the freedom of speech and expression was originally understood by the framers of the Constitution.