Short note

I present a public beta of the Constitutional Observer that was in the works for a few months now. It brings together a corpus of the Constituent Assembly debates and questions from the LS. It is envisioned as a comparative interface to understand the historical context of a constitutional argument. You can ask it seemingly simple questions, and it will semantically understand and return relevant responses from both datasets.

Link: constitutional.observer More detail: constitutional.observer/about

Exhibit at Srishti Manipal Institute, Bengaluru in May 2024
The conceptual framing of these questions is meant to poke curiosity at a primal level, outside of explicit notions of political questioning.These were first exhibited at SMI Collective 2024, a show case of Srishti Manipal final semester projects at MAHE, Bengaluru

Note

How do people, as citizens, question the government? Holding the government accountable is one of the primary parliamentary roles of the opposition. However, as common citizens, we do not know much of how the Parliament functions. The realities of our democracy means there are always people who are ignored, sidelined, pushed, reduced and small-cased. What protects their rights?

Those being marginalised exist across a spectrum. There are grave threats to their lives, and there is a slow erosion of their rights. The erosion may be in many ways: In marriage laws, in their right to drink water, in the lack of food availability or in their right to pray.

How have the makers of the Constitution dealt with these? How does the Parliament deal with it? How do people come together to demand? This exhibit explores the making of these questions: What should we question? And how best do we begin questioning? The experiences woven into the web-platform allow you to do that — Question more, Question deeply.

Roadmap notes

This project is open to critical feedback and collaborations. Largely following:

  1. Curating/tagging and reviewing paragraphs from the debates then use it for improving search inside the Observer. Then, release a Dataset that other public spirited individuals/organisations can use.
  2. Understanding the documentation of Lok Sabha debates better and actually obtain paragraphs of debates instead of Questions and Answers as is used in the Observer. This also opens up possibilities of research into the debates to a larger audience, as PDF daily logs can be hard to parse into machine understandable formats.
  3. Explore more public spaces to exhibit the print installation. The installation appears to have drawn many curious observers, and I believe there is value in exploring public spaces in the city as possible locations for the exhibit.
  4. Explore the possibility of multilingual questions, since it appears quite possible for both the installation and the Observer to reach a wider audience with Kannada, Tamil, Hindi or other language based questions