Sixteen Stormy Days narrates the riveting story of the First Amendment to the Constitution of India-one of the pivotal events in Indian political and constitutional history, and its first great battle of ideas. Passed in June 1951 in the face of tremendous opposition within and outside Parliament, the subject of some of independent India’s fiercest parliamentary debates, the First Amendment drastically curbed freedom of speech; enabled caste-based reservation by restricting freedom against discrimination; circumscribed the right to property and validated abolition of the zamindari system; and fashioned a special schedule of unconstitutional laws immune to judicial challenge. Enacted months before India’s inaugural election, the amendment represents the most profound changes that the Constitution has ever seen. Faced with an expansively liberal Constitution that stood in the way of nearly every major socio-economic plan in the Congress party’s manifesto, a judiciary vigorously upholding civil liberties, and a press fiercely resisting his attempt to control public discourse, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru reasserted executive supremacy, creating the constitutional architecture for repression and coercion.What extraordinary set of events led the prime minister-who had championed the Constitution when it was passed in 1950 after three years of deliberation-to radically amend it after a mere sixteen days of debate in 1951?Drawing on parliamentary debates, press reports, judicial pronouncements, official correspondence and existing scholarship, Sixteen Stormy Days challenges conventional wisdom on iconic figures such as Jawaharlal Nehru, B.R. Ambedkar, Rajendra Prasad, Sardar Patel and Shyama Prasad Mookerji, and lays bare the vast gulf between the liberal promise of India’s Constitution and the authoritarian impulses of her first government.
‘An important contribution … Delving lucidly into the most significant ideological battles of the era, this book deftly outlines the thinking and dialogue that laid the foundations of the Republic – and which remain deeply relevant and contentious today’
Shashi Tharoor, author of Inglorious Empire
A history of Nehru that dives deep into the debates of his era to understand his ideology – and that of his contemporaries and opponents, asking what India would look like had another bold young mind with fiercely held views led during the country’s formative years of independence.
Sixty years after the death of Jawaharal Nehru, the independence activist and first prime minister of India continues to be deified and vilified in equal measure. And still in contemporary political debate, the ideological spectrum remains defined by the degree of divergence from Nehru’s ideas. With the Nehruvian ideals increasingly juxtaposed against the positions of Nehru’s erstwhile contemporaries and questions asked about what might have happened on the Indian subcontinent had another hero of that era taken leadership, this book explores his encounters with key contemporaries to excavate and evaluate the views that were in circulation.
It examines the founder of Pakistan Mohammad Ali Jinnah and his cause of Hindu-Muslim unity, Shyama Prasad Mookerjee of the Hindu Mahasabha and his fierce defence of the constitution, the Congress leader Sardar Patel, with whom Nehru often disagreed about the threat of China, and Mohammad Iqbal, the poet and politician whose letters on Muslim solidarity were often issued from a prison cell.
The correspondence and interactions that Nehru had with these key personalities captures the essence of how post-independent India was projected as a nation, and the early directions it took towards self-definition.
