CONSTITUTIONALISM Vs SOCIALISM IN INDIA

CONSTITUTIONALISM Vs. SOCIALISM IN INDIA

On 24th November 2021, Shruti Rajagopalan, the Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Centre at George Mason University conversed with the students of GIPE about Socialism and Constitutionalism in India. She began this session by answering the question which she herself faced initially while researching on the mind boggling topic- “Our constitution has lots of frequent amendments, but what exactly is the Government amending?”

In the talk, Shruti Rajgopalan spoke about how the information she was sharing was the result of roughly ten years of work. She spoke about how there has been a decline in the rule of law in India which is reflected by the frequent amendments in the Indian Constitution. She further argued that the formal institutions of socialist planning were fundamentally incompatible with the constraints imposed by the Indian Constitution. This incompatibility led to frequent amendments to the Constitution, especially in the area of Fundamental Rights. Consequently, pursuit of socialist policies gradually undermined the Constitution. She then went on to say that the contradictory mixture of socialism and constitutionalism led to economic and political deprivations that were never intended by the framers. 

Mrs. Rajagopalan has also written a paper on the same which analyzes the historical, ideological and economic context for constitutional amendments to understand the reason for the deterioration of constitutionalism in India. In this paper, she has demonstrated the incompatibility between socialism and constitutionalism using evidence from five-year plans and constitutional amendments in India.