Modern constitutionalism which seeks to limit governmental authority has historically been in conflict with the idea of illimitable sovereign power. Yet new sovereign imaginaries of theocratic and aggressive nationalism today stake a claim to the political sphere not by having constitutions suspended but by translating their ideologies into the language of constitutionalism itself. My research studies this global problematic in the South Asian context. It investigates how, despite being hostile to the founding principles of civic-nationalism and liberal-secularism, the ethno-nationalist and socio-religious movements of Hindutva and Islamism have successfully instrumentalized constitutionalism to become politically powerful in postcolonial India and Pakistan.

A key output of this strand of work is a book project on the entangled relationship between law and sovereignty in the constitutional imagination of modern India. Beginning with the present moment of Hindu nationalism, my book undertakes a conceptual history of India’s constitutional project, covering both the colonial and postcolonial period, and seeks to retroactively make sense of how we got here. It presents India as an active intellectual agent whose founders rethought and remade constituent power, or the power of constitution-making, in their debates on democracy, self-determination, caste, religion and political association in the mid-twentieth century. But far from presenting a celebratory juridical account of an authentic nationalist self-realization, it establishes that India’s political field was marked by a fundamental dissensus in respect of these ideas, whose ramifications can be felt in constitutional thought and action even today.

Moiz was awarded a 3 year Early Career Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust.