Constitutional conundrums : challenges to India`s democratic process

Books on Indian democracy and the Constitution are plenty. The author of a new book on the subject, therefore, has the obligation to reveal its unique selling proposition (USP) at the outset to the reader.

This book has no pretensions of being academically rigorous. Nor is it just a collection of articles, published elsewhere. The book is the result of a legal journalist's pursuit of debates that interested him over the past few years by revisiting them, and filling up crucial gaps in understanding issues and controversies reported or missed in the media. The purpose of the book is to enlighten the reader about the current challenges and the future of Indian democratic experiment.

Journalists love controversies. When the controversies they once enjoyed reporting get dated as they are bound to, they move on to the new ones, relegating the old to the footnotes of history. But the obsession with immediacy-the basic characteristic of the profession and a principle for survival in it-takes its toll. The attributes which suffer are the ability and willingness to pause, research and reflect amidst stringent deadlines. An over-emphasis on quantity rather than quality of journalistic pieces is the result. Thus seeking reactions to current controversies becomes an end in itself rather than a means to unravel or demystify issues which appear to be complex. Curiosity, which is the hallmark of journalism, thus becomes secondary to the immediate professional demands.

This book, in a sense, is a result of my growing frustration with the practice of my own journalistic craft over the years, even though pieces resulting from the craft appeared to be most satisfying to my peers and the readers. This paradox is easy to understand if one realizes that the average shelf-life of a journalistic piece, at the most, can be just one week, if it appears in a magazine. Both the journalist and his reader just move on, without an incentive to look back, connect the dots with the present and the future, admit errors in judging men and matters, and to report significant aspects which went unreported earlier because of sheer oversight.