The Indian Constitution: Conversations with Power
By Gautam Bhatia
HarperCollins, 300 pages, Rs 599.00

Gautam Bhatia, a Delhi-based advocate who also teaches at the Jindal Global Law School, has emerged as an ace interpreter of the Indian Constitution since his much-acclaimed 2019 work ‘The Transformative Constitution’ (2019), followed by ‘Unsealed Covers’ (2023). (In between, he has also found time to write three science-fiction novels.) And he has published his third book on the Indian Constitution.

It’s a topic much debated these days. Copies of the Constitution showed up in election rallies last year. The BJP-led government, especially during its second term with the new mandate, set about to reshape governance, several constitutional issues have come up for analysis. Many decisions of the government have been challenged in the Supreme Court. The author himself was involved in some of them, such as the challenge to the abrogation of Article 370, the electoral bonds case and the right to privacy case. But, as he clarifies in the prologue after a brief recap of some of these matters, he does not focus on them themselves but uses them to “think more deeply about the Indian Constitution’s structure and design, and in particular, the Constitution as a power map”. In other words, the attempt here is not “the actions of the central executive” themselves, but “illuminate the design of the web [of power relations] and the manner in which its overlapping strands constitute its architecture”.

Thus, Bhatia’s path-breaking analysis reveals how power flows through India’s democracy. From federalism to fundamental rights, from parliamentary powers to people’s sovereignty-discover how the Constitution shapes our daily lives. It adds new insights to the debates on Article 370, emergency powers and federalism. This work offers a fresh analysis of the Constitution, which also happens to complete 75 years in 2025 – an ideal time for undertaking such an endeavour.

The central thesis of the book runs thus: When it comes to the debates about the Constitution, what is missing is the question of power. The Constitution, is after all, a document that creates, shapes, channels, and constrains power. Examining the history of Constitution-making, the debates in the Constituent Assembly, the Indian Constitution’s design and structure, and the judicial decisions that have shaped it, Bhatia argues that the Constitution has been a battleground upon which different visions of power have contested for supremacy.

Once this new lens, ‘power’ – indicated in the sub-title of the book, is used to analyse it, there is revealed a “centralizing drift”, that is, a drift towards a concentration of power within the union executive, which is there in the founding text itself. It has been at the heart of the contest for supremacy. Elements of this drift are embedded within the Constitution’s design, but it has also been accelerated, at crucial historical moments, by Supreme Court judgments.

Bhatia argues that this centralizing drift is not inevitable. There have been moments of dissent and departure, which have illumined alternative possibilities. It is for the citizens of India to decide, ultimately, what vision(s) of constitutional power they want to adopt through their Constitution.

A timely and critical interrogation of the Indian Constitution through the lens of power, this book asks certain fundamental questions about the structures and institutions that the Constitution establishes and the webs of power that it creates.

For students and scholars, and for informed citizens, this book is a must-read to better understand the debates that are shaping the future of the nation.