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PUBLISHED: 4 JULY 2025

This book interrogates the reasons why constitutional democracies in South Asia are under threat, provides a coherent and calibrated account of the causes behind their erosion, and evaluates the resilience of democratic institutions to combat such threats. It considers the design and functioning of institutions including political parties, legislatures, the political executive, the bureaucracy, courts, fourth branch/integrity institutions (such as electoral commissions) and the military to understand their roles in strengthening or undermining constitutional democracy in South Asia. It is written at a time when concerns about the stability of constitutional democracies, even long-established democracies, have been rising globally.

  • South Asia has had a tumultuous and varied experience with constitutional democracy that predates the recent rise in populism. Pakistan and Bangladesh have frequently changed regime type, from democracy to autocracy and back. Sri Lanka and India have been relatively more stable, but serious concerns are being expressed about the resilience of their democratic institutions. Nepal and Afghanistan, as some of the youngest democracies in the world, pose another set of questions on the issue of democratic and constitutional stability.

    And yet, the global South has remained largely ignored by constitutional law and democracy scholars. This book addresses this gap. Contributors come from across South Asia, including India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Afghanistan, to present a unified contribution to the South Asia-centric literature on the topic of the stability and resilience of constitutional democracies.

 

BOOK PANEL

In this Book Panel hosted by the Pluralist Agreement and Constitutional Transformation (PACT) Project on 15 June 2023, the volume editors Swati Jhaveri, Tarunabh Khaitan and Dinesha Samararatne discuss the collection with additional commentary from two discussants: Shree Agnihotri and Sadaf Aziz.

 

REVIEWS & FULLER INFORMATION

In a recent long-form book review, Demoptimism Director Tom Daly recognises the importance of this landmark collection:

“While observers such as Pankaj Mishra see anger and resentment generated by the gap between modernism’s promises and their fulfilment in South Asia – of equality, prosperity, and effective governance – this collection suggests that innovation and creativity, too, are spurred by working in the gap between constitutionalism’s promises and the realization of those promises. Where this collection converges with Mishra is that, in understanding South Asia, we must discard any “simple dualisms”. This book’s disruption of dualities, capturing a more complex reality, and fostering a community to carry out this vital work in a communal conversation, is a revolutionary project insofar as it does not merely seek to incrementally build on what has come before, but to create genuinely new frameworks, conversations, and structures for exchange, laying the groundwork for further discussion…”.

READ THE FULL REVIEW HERE
 
 

    • Preface

    • Foreword
      Arun Thiruvengadam (National Law School, India)

      Part 1: The Problem of Constitutional Resilience Decoded

    • 1. Constitutional Resilience in South Asia: A Primer, Swati Jhaveri (National University of Singapore, Singapore), Tarunabh Khaitan (University of Oxford, UK) and Dinesha Samararatne (University of Colombo, Sri Lanka)

      Part 2: Constitutional Design

    • 2. Institutional Resilience and Political Transitions in Sri Lanka and Beyond, Dian Shah (National University of Singapore, Singapore) and Mario Gomez (International Centre for Ethnic Studies, Sri Lanka)

    • 3. Old Powers and New Forces in the Bhutanese Constitution – Anticipating the Resilience of a Young Constitution, Michaela Windischgraetz (University of Vienna, Austria)

      Part 3: Federalism
      4. Territorial Dynamics in Sri Lanka:

    • Federalism, Unitarism and Path Dependence, Jayani Nadarajalingam (University of Melbourne, Australia) and Zim Nwokora (Deakin University, Australia)

    • 5. Proposing a Solidarity-Based Federalism for Sri Lanka, Erika Arban (Melbourne Law School, Australia)

    • 6. The Constitutional Resilience of Human Rights in New Federal States: Local Government and the National Human Rights Commission in Nepal, Hari P. Dhungana (Nepal Open University, Nepal) and Iain Payne (University of New South Wales, Australia)

      Part 4: The Political Branches

    • 7. Killing a Constitution with a Thousand Cuts: Aggrandisement and Party–State Fusion in India, Tarunabh Khaitan (University of Oxford, UK)

    • 8. Dysfunction and Ad Hocism in Agenda Setting: Compromising of the Lok Sabha in India, Devendra Damle (Open Network for Digital Commerce, India) and Shubho Roy (University of Chicago, USA)

    • 9. Dysfunction Resilience of the Afghan Civil Service, Ebrahim Afsah (University of Vienna, Austria)

      Part 5: The Judiciary

    • 10. The Maldives: A Parable of Judicial Crisis, Institutional Corrosion, and Democratic Demise, Ahmed Nazeer (University of Portsmouth, UK)

    • 11. Judicial Evasion, Judicial Vagueness and Judicial Revisionism: A Study of the NCT of Delhi v Union of India Judgment(s), Gautam Bhatia (India)

      Part 6: Fourth Branch (Guarantor) Institutions

    • 12. Sri Lanka's Guarantor Branch: Constitutional Resilience by Stealth? Dinesha Samararatne (University of Colombo, Sri Lanka)

    • 13. The South Asian Fourth Branch: Designing Election Commissions for Constitutional Resilience, Michael Pal (University of Ottawa, Canada)

    • 14. Between Trust and Democracy: The Election Commission of India and the Question of Constitutional Accountability, M. Mohsin Alam Bhat (Jindal Global University, India)

    • 15. The Turbulent Journey and Overlooked Opportunities of Electoral Democracy in Bangladesh, Muhammad Omar Faruque (Bangladesh Judicial Service, Bangladesh)

      Part 7: The Military

    • 16. Rescuing the Agency and Resilience of Civilian Political Actors: Civil-Military Relations in Pakistan, 2008-20, Farhan Hanif Siddiqi (Quaid-i-Azam University, Pakistan)

    • 17. A Frozen Democratic Transition: Pakistan's Hybrid Regime and Weak Party System, Muhammad Salman (Habib University, Pakistan) and Marzia Raza (University of Osnabrück, Germany)

      Part 8: The People

    • 18. Rethinking Constitutional Resilience from Below: Dalit Rights and Land Reform, Faizan Jawed Siddiqi (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)

    • 19. Constitutional Patriotism in India: Appreciating the People as Constitutional Actors, Jahnavi Sindhu (Humboldt University, Germany) and Vikram Aditya Narayan (Humboldt University, Germany)

      Part 9: Conclusion

    • 20. Epilogue: Resilience and Political Constitutionalism in South Asia and Beyond, Philipp Dann (Humboldt University, Germany)

  • Swati Jhaveri is an Associate Fellow of the Asian Law Centre at the Melbourne Law School, Australia.

    Tarunabh Khaitan is Professor (Chair) of Public Law at the LSE Law School, UK, and an Honorary Professorial Fellow at Melbourne Law School, Australia.

    Dinesha Samararartne is Professor at the Department of Public & International Law at the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka, and Senior Fellow at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

 

ADDITIONAL BOOK REVIEWS

Prerna Dhoop - International Journal of Constitutional Law

The editors of Constitutional Resilience in South Asia have adopted a normative and functional approach to study “constitutional resilience” as both a principle and practice in South Asian countries. They primarily use the institutional and design features of constitutions and official actors as the book’s scaffolding. Almost all contributors engage in a macro-analysis of the traditional organs and machinery of constitutional democracy, namely, the executive, legislature, judiciary, political parties, guarantor institutions, and the military. (…)

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