New Delhi, June 3 -- Anti-colonial movements of the 20th century generated audacious ideas of freedom. After decolonisation, however, the challenge was to give an institutional form to those radical ideas. Legalizing the Revolution: India and the Constitution of the Postcolony is a new book by scholar Sandipto Dasgupta, which provides an innovative account of how India ultimately addressed this daunting challenge. It's a fresh and somewhat revisionist look at the making of the postcolonial constitutional order, and tries to place the current crisis of liberal democracy in proper historical and conceptual context. Dasgupta spoke about the themes of his book on a recent episode of Grand Tamasha, a weekly podcast on Indian politics and policy co-produced by HT and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Dasgupta is an assistant professor of politics at the New School for Social Research, where he works on the history of modern political and social thought, especially the political theory of empire, decolonisation, and postcolonial order. His new book was recently awarded the Francine Frankel prize for Best Book on South Asian Politics by the American Political Science Association. On the podcast, Dasgupta spoke to host Milan Vaishnav about the intricate, two-way relationship between decolonisation and constitution making. "We should think of post-colonial constitutions - constitutions made after decolonisation - as not a kind of template which is being derived or not, but as this novel and challenging project of building institutions," the author said. "If you had an anti-colonial movement, you had these aspirations, these ideas of how will you have a country after it gains independence? The constitution making process is the process of giving concrete institutional shape to those aspirations." Dasgupta explained that to understand post-colonial constitutions, one cannot start with the template of constitutional theory, but from the history of decolonisation. "The history of decolonisation can and should tell us something about this distinctive project of post-colonial constitution making," Dasgupta stated. The author also faulted many current political analyses of India for fixating on the majoritarian excesses of democracy. In Dasgupta's telling, it is not the excess of democracy but its scarcity that led us to our current moment. "One of the main claims the British had in India is that Indians are not a unified entity, they are a bunch of different religions and castes. And if we leave, they will all kill each other. And the Congress is saying, 'No, there is an Indian identity. We are building it. Look at us, there are all these different groups coming together on the streets. This is what we are building as this new political identity of what it means to be an Indian,'" he said. Dasgupta said that the political visions of both the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have unfortunately reverted to the conceiving of democracy as a mathematical equation. Dasgupta warned that both parties are complicit in the narrowing down of democracy into electoralism - or a game of numbers. "Democracy becomes an arithmetic process rather than some kind of process which transforms you," he said. According to the scholar, greater democracy and deeper political participation allow for new political identities to be formed, which are based on politics and not what you were given or inherited....