The Enzo Ferrari who emerges from this biography is a complex man, a mix of the ingenuous and the ingenious
How capitalist economies can reform and be serious about tackling climate change
Mathew John’s India’s Communal Constitution is a thoughtful exploration of the gap between the Indian Constitution’s “liberal promise of equal liberties” to all citizens, and actual constitutional design and practice, which has often “cast the identity of the Indian people along religious lines.” John frames his argument as a descriptive and diagnostic one, aiming to excavate how the “communal orientation of the Indian Constitution … [exerts a] drag … on its liberal goals.”
As is now well-established in scholarly literature, British rule in India was marked by a vision of the Indian people as divided into – and dened by – their communal identities. This came through specically in the colonial doctrine of non-interference, or – as John puts it – “tolerance” of communally-identied personal laws. However, this had the eect of often creating the very communities that it was meant to identify, and establishing rigid borders that did not exist previously. John argues that in the post-constitutional era, the Supreme Court’s “essential religious practices” test has continued to serve the same purpose: that is, “identifying religion through its essential truths is … a conceptual frame that holds together ideas about India, its people, and the problem of establishing government for its diverse peoples.” While the essential religious practices test has been questioned – most notably in both the majority and the dissenting opinions in the Sabarimala judgment – it continues to hold the eld, and to shape denitions of community through specic doctrine.
If the essential religious practices test is one side of the coin, “personal law” is the other. John explores how the colonial period was responsible for the construction of “Anglo-Hindu law,” which had a dubious basis (at best) in the realities of social custom. However, it was precisely this construction – and, accompanying it, Muslim law – that endured even in the post-constitutional period, primarily through the judgment of the Bombay High Court in Narasu Appa Mali, which held that “personal laws” were immune from judicial scrutiny. The Supreme Court’s failure to overturn Narasu Appa Mali – despite having the opportunity to do so in the Triple Talaq case – reects how “the Communal Constitution frames the Indian people in axiomatically organised scriptural or doctrinal terms across dierent aspects or domains of the Constitution … in addition, the Communal Constitution also interlocks dierent parts of the Constitution to collectively reiterate the Communal Constitution.”
A fascinating third chapter of the book explores the construction of minority rights in both the colonial and
Modern economic growth and rising demand for goods at relatively lower prices have led to inevitable exploitation of nature, and consequent climate change. There is no denying that unfettered capitalism has contributed to over extraction of natural resources and increasing emission of greenhouse gases. Should uncontrolled capitalism persist till 2050, the aim of restricting average global temperature within 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels may remain a pipe dream. Emitting billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide will see continued climate extremes leading to the loss of lives and livelihoods. No wonder, climate emergencies have become frequent.
Many environmentalists believe that the long-term solution to tackling climate crises is to uproot capitalism because “we cannot solve the problem by what caused it”. But with time short for averting catastrophic climate change, the possibility of putting a new economic system in place may seem improbable.
Transform, progress
In Climate Capitalism, Akshat Rathi explores how to transform the world’s dominant economic system while ensuring that the wheels of post-colonial periods. The unity of the nation-state was essentially posited by the Indian nationalists as a counter-point to British justications for refusing to grant India independence, on the basis that minorities required British protection. While the Indian Constitution did eventually enshrine a set of minority rights under Articles 29 and 30, the social construction of the majority and minority remained on explicitly communal lines. Thus, when certain communities – such as the Ramakrishna Mission or the Swaminarayana sect – claimed a status apart from Hinduism, and demanded minority rights protection, the Supreme Court rejected these claims. As John notes, “the court in both decisions draped an overarching axiomatic and doctrinal frame on Hindu belief and practice and held that the Swaminarayans and the Ramakrishna Mission were part of this conception of the Hindu.” Crucially, “this opinion stood at odds with the self-presentation of these groups as distinct communities in a manner entirely consistent with India’s millennial traditions of pluralism and diversity.” This bears out John’s claim that the communal constitution consists of a web of interlocking design and practice features.
India’s Communal Constitution: Law, Religion, and the Making of a People
Mathew John
Cambridge University Press ₹995
The caste lens
The nal substantive chapter examines caste through the lens of the communal constitution; and, in particular, the challenges to the Scheduled Castes Order, and the Court’s refusal to extend caste-based aªrmative action to converts out of Hinduism. John refers to this as the “sacralisation” of caste, or an approach that understands caste discrimination in terms of pre-dened and pre-xed religious communities.
Through these carefully chosen examples, India’s Communal Constitution encourages us to think more deeply about the communal underpinnings of Indian constitutional design and practice. In doing so, John’s book joins a recent set of works that have sought to move beyond a framing of the Constitution as an inherently progressive document, whose workings have been stymied through the many failures of the political class and of the judiciary; rather, it encourages us to focus on the design of the Constitution itself, especially by locating court judgments within a longer colonial and post-colonial tradition. While John frames his enquiry as a diagnostic one, it is undoubtedly critical in nature, and compels all of us to take a deeper, and more critical look at the Constitution itself.
The reviewer is a Delhi-based lawyer and the author of, among others, The Transformative Constitution: A Radical Biography in Nine Acts. progress don’t come to a halt. From renewable power to green cement, electric cars to carbon capture, emission-reducing technologies have tossed new opportunities for private capital and government regulations to work in tandem. The process to harness the forces of capitalism to achieve zero emissions has already begun. Although these are still early days for capitalism to wear a natural look for addressing impending climatic concerns, a faint ray of
In the mid-1990s, when I was reporting Formula One races in Europe, the most impressive sight in the sport was the one-lakh-plus Ferrari fans – called the tifosi – cheering at the San Marino Grand Prix. Everyone was in red. A non-Italian driver in a Ferrari was a bigger hero than an Italian driver in any other car – the team, not the individual, mattered.
The Ferrari is more than the sum of its race victories, just as its founder Enzo Ferrari was more than his sporting, entrepreneurial and managerial selves. The machine’s early association with death soon made way for its status as a symbol of everything stylish and sexy. As Luca di Montezemolo,
Ferrari’s president and CEO for 23 years said: “We don’t sell a car, we sell a dream.”
Enzo, who died at 90 (in 1988) wrote his autobiography, My Terrible Joys, in 1962. In recent years biographies have appeared at a fair clip, including this comprehensive one by Luca Dal Monte, a one-time Ferrari employee. He told the New York Times, “In Italy, there was the Pope and then there was Enzo.”
The early years
Enzo lived through the amateur years of motorsports on miserable roads in the 1920s, through the inauguration of Formula One in 1950, the glamour of the 1960s and ’70s and the technological advancements of the 1990s.
Ferrari’s record in Formula One – 16 constructors’ titles and 15 drivers’ championships – is unmatched. Some of the optimism seems to have been generated.
It has been over two decades that industrial capitalism has been critiqued for neither pricing nor accounting its negative externalities. It liquidates natural capital and calls it prot, undervaluing both natural resources and living systems. Rathi chronicles the political manoeuvrings that made possible China’s lead in building eets of electric cars, India’s success in promoting solar power, America’s
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Solar panels in the Pavagada Solar Park, Karnataka. success with reversing climate damages in the oil industry, and the Danish quest for pushing wind turbines. All such initiatives combined, it has been estimated that 2% of global GDP is enough to make the carbon dioxide problem go away. Far from being linear, however, there are disruptive elements that play upon power politics to sully the path to zero emissions. Politics, technology and nance must align in the right direction to bring about change, says Rathi.
To work as a unit
greatest drivers won world championships in Ferraris: Michael Schumacher, Niki Lauda, Alberto Ascari, Juan Manuel Fangio. Lauda made the most profound statement about the sport when he said the aim was to win by going as slowly as possible.
It was not a philosophy easily digested. Between 1955 and 1971, eight drivers were killed driving Ferraris; Enzo was likened by a Vatican newspaper to Saturn who consumed his own sons.
In 1957, a Ferrari ploughed into the crowd at the road race in Mille Miglia, killing both drivers and nine spectators – a scene picturised with horror and fascination in the Netix movie Ferrari, based on the 1991 biography Enzo Ferrari: The Man, the Cars, the Races, the Machine by Brock Yates.
That race is described thus: “The notion of fast cars racing on real roads, around twisting mountain hairpins and through narrow city streets, was the embodiment of every
With climate emergencies threatening life, public perception on the global climatic accords and green initiatives remains grossly sceptical. Holding an optimist
Climate Capitalism ₹699
Enzo Ferrari: The Definitive Biography of an Icon
Luca Dal Monte
Hachette India
₹2,232 man’s fantasy to charge down an open road at out, unencumbered by laws or moral and social impediments of any kind. For all its insanity, the Mille Miglia encompassed an entire lifetime condensed into a few hours. To have competed in it meant that a position, Rathi argues that we cannot insulate ourselves from the transformation coming our way. From bureaucrats to billionaires, doers to enforcers, there are multiple actors on the capitalist platform who would need to bridge dierences to reform the economic system and help shape a climate-conducive capitalism.
Passionate capitalists fear that policy reforms may kill the market. But policy shifts in favour of climate-oriented technologies and investments have created new business opportunities. Whether such eorts add up to make an impact at global scale is yet to be fully ascertained. Some trends are noticeable, the U.K. economy grew by 60% between 1990 and 2017 while its carbon emissions declined by 40%. The task lies in replicating and escalating such transformative processes and practices. Although climate nancing may have been slow, the Paris Agreement has triggered a process of change.
Climate Capitalism conveys an optimistic narrative which contends that it’s cheaper to save the world than destroy it. What kindles a ray of hope is that capitalists themselves have woken up to both the cost of inaction and the opportunity of action.
The reviewer is an independent writer, researcher and academic man had faced down the spectre of violent death for half a day…”
‘The assassin’
The wife of one of Ferrari’s drivers always referred to him as “the assassin” after the crash. Enzo was devastated, and wanted to quit motor racing; along with the organiser of the race he had become the most hated man in Italy. Ferrari’s rst American driver, Phil Hill, said when he left the team, “I wasn’t his type, not gung-ho enough. I wasn’t willing to die for Enzo Ferrari.”
Yet, the successes and failures had begun innocuously enough. Dal Monte’s year-by-year narrative starts with the birth and ends with the death of his subject. At ten, Enzo decided that racing would be his calling after his father took him to see one. But even as he was winning races, his heart was in the manufacture of cars and in the making of a racing team. He succeeded spectacularly at both, with a mixture of skill, instinct and the ability to manipulate both people and events.
His love life owered; he had a son who was seen as his successor but died at 24; he had another son by one of his lovers who did succeed him. Dal Monte quotes a newspaper which called Enzo “a practical value-increaser of his abilities.” It was apt.
Complex personality
The Enzo who emerges from the book is a complex man, a mix of the ingenuous and the ingenious. He read Stendhal and Leopardi and loved Kafka. He dealt with the fascist government in Italy for business reasons, as he dealt with the occupying forces. He saved lives, protecting them from the Nazis. He himself was on the hitlist for assisting the resistance.
Dal Monte’s research is exhaustive, and occasionally exhausting. Enzo is much written about; besides, he also shaped the stories he would want future biographers to tell.
Dal Monte gives us the standard biography and adds enough new material to make it the denitive one. But such breadth and granularity comes with a challenge: keeping track of the names and occupations and car models is a bit like trying to remember everything in a Russian novel when you read one as a boy or girl. Still, worth it.
The reviewer’s latest book is Why Don’t You Write Something I Might Read?.