Dr Rochana Bajpai awarded major AHRC grant worth nearly £1million to lead a collaborative ...
17 March 2022
Dr Rochana Bajpai, Reader (Associate Professor) in Politics in the Department of Politics and International Studies, has been awarded £825,235 (£1,011,182 FEC) by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for ‘Pluralist Agreement and Constitutional Transformation (PACT)’, a three-year collaborative research project (2022-25) on rethinking the making of constitutions in divided societies.
PACT will be led from SOAS by Dr Bajpai (Principal Investigator), with Dr Nicholas Cole (Oxford), Dr Udit Bhatia (Sheffield), Professor Sudhir Krishnaswamy (National Law School of India, Bengaluru) as Co-Investigators, and Centre for Law and Policy Research (Bengaluru) as project partner.
Dr Rochana Bajpai said:
“I am delighted that the AHRC has funded PACT in the 75th year of Indian independence. PACT is a unique international collaboration between political theorists, historians, legal scholars and educationists, underpinned by over two decades of scholarship on the making of the Indian Constitution. The funding is an important opportunity to explore the resources that the digitization of constitutional debates offers for new research and public engagement with constitution-making in divided societies, at a time when freedoms of speech, religion, and movement are increasingly restricted across the globe.”
PACT is a ground-breaking, multi-disciplinary international collaboration, which will research and digitize processes of constitutional negotiation and transformation over time. It will explore popular constitutionalism as an alternative source of democratic legitimacy to elections for pluralist politics, for enabling the negotiation of differences across lines of social and ideological division, in an era of populist nationalism and increasing authoritarianism.
Historical constitutions are susceptible to the democratic challenge that these were written mostly by elite men, drawn from dominant socio-economic groups. Focusing on the important example of the making of the Indian Constitution, PACT will research wider engagement by elites and citizens with constitution-making. It will contextualize, for the first time on an advanced digital platform, the official records of the Indian Constituent Assembly debates (1946-49) within wider public debates on constitution-making.
PACT will develop the digital techniques pioneered at The Quill Project, Oxford for the making of the U.S. constitution, to reconstitute the archive of Indian constitution-making. The digital platform will display the evolving context within which actors worked, and link Indian constitutional debates to those on the American founding, enabling researchers as well as public users to access, visualize and compare constitutional debates across national boundaries in new ways. Finally, PACT will deploy its digital platform to elicit contemporary meanings of the Indian constitution initiating conversations between scholars, practitioners, and members of the public in India and the U.K.
