Fantasy constitutions

In his final speech as chair of the assembly that drafted India’s Constitution, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar described a contradiction between the formal equality that the Constitution guaranteed and the country’s socioeconomic inequality. This article follows two interpretive traditions of India’s Constitution: the first, developed by the Supreme Court in challenging land reform legislation, is the doctrine of “basic structure” which holds that the Constitution has an intrinsic, unamendable form. The second, in a low-caste forest rights movement in Uttar Pradesh, holds that, because of Ambedkar’s role in its drafting, the true Constitution grants lower castes both socioeconomic equality and sovereignty. Each tradition, I argue, posits a fantasy constitution that resolves Ambedkar’s contradiction, claiming to represent a founding constituent order to enact entirely different political visions.