In this episode, Prof. Srijan Sandip Mandal from NALSAR and Jeetendra from Law and Other Things speaks with Professors Rohit De (Yale University) and Ornit Shani (University of Haifa), whose new book Assembling India’s Constitution: A New Democratic History (Cambridge University Press, 2025) offers a transformative account of how India’s Constitution came to be.

Challenging the familiar story that it was crafted only within the Constituent Assembly, the authors show how people across India— from princely states, courts, and tribal regions to everyday citizens—actively debated, contested, and co-created constitutional ideas.

The conversation explores the book’s rich archival discoveries, the “fever of constitutional expectations” that gripped the country in the 1940s, and how ordinary Indians helped shape the foundations of democracy.

What happens when a Constitution promises rights, but the systems built around it keep concentrating power?In this episode, LAOT host Arnav Mathur speaks with constitutional scholar Dr. Gautam Bhatia about his new book, The Indian Constitution: A Conversation with Power. The book reframes the Constitution as a map of power, showing how its design and interpretation have enabled what Dr. Bhatia calls the “centralising drift.”The discussion unpacks the idea of a “Franken-Constitution,” the limits of courts and popular constitutionalism, and the unspoken “constitutional common sense” that shapes outcomes. It also asks a difficult question: can India’s Constitution still imagine a more decentralised, plural future?

In this part II of the Episode, we continue the discussion with Prof. Tarunabh Khaitan and Prof. Surbhi Karwa about their book “Hum Bharat Ke Log”" a remarkable work that brings India’s most important constitutional debates such as democracy, freedoms, federalism, and the rule of law to a wider public.

The conversation explores what it means to make constitutional ideas truly accessible without losing rigour, and how language itself shapes who gets to engage with the Constitution. Together, we discuss the core principles of rule of law, secularism, socialism, and democracy, and reflect on the challenges of democratic backsliding, all in a way that invites even non-lawyers to think, question, and analyse the issues shaping India today.