Hyderabad, June 19 -- The constitutional answer to the politics of inherited grievance is neither obscure nor difficult to discover. It lies in the circumstances in which the republic itself was conceived.

One of the great ironies of contemporary India is that the Constitution is frequently invoked while the conditions of its birth are forgotten. The Constitution was not drafted in an age of tranquillity. It emerged amidst refugee camps, communal massacres, forced migrations and the collapse of centuries-old patterns of coexistence.

The framers were not idealists insulated from the realities of sectarian conflict. They had witnessed those realities in their most brutal form. Their constitutional choices were, therefore, not abstractions...