‘It’s not just a little red book’

Seventy-five years ago, our forefathers brought forth upon a divided Subcontinent a nation conceived as a continuation of an old civilisation. ‘India that is Bharat’ was an idea whose pledge was being redeemed in a post-colonial world.

Few gave it much of a chance.

A quote attributed to Winston Churchill warned, ‘If Independence is granted to India, power will go to the hands of rascals, rogues, freebooters; all Indian leaders will be of low calibre and men of straw. They will have sweet tongues and silly hearts. They will fight amongst themselves for power and India will be lost in political squabbles. A day would come when even air and water would be taxed in India.’

As we mark the 75th anniversary of the signing of the Indian Constitution on 26 November 1949, it’s a wonder that we have lasted so long. Dr Ambedkar in his last address to the Constituent Assembly, on 25 November 1949, had his forebodings:

“Will history repeat itself? It is this thought which fills me with anxiety. This anxiety is deepened by the realisation of the fact that in addition to our old enemies in the form of castes and creeds, we are going to have many political parties with diverse and opposing political creeds."

Recent events have seen an exaltation of political creed above the peaceful functioning of the country. ‘India that is Bharat’ is being supplanted with the notion of ‘Bharatiyata’, relegating to the background the ‘idea of India’.

A Hindi–Hindu–Hindustan vision necessarily implies that those whose identities do not fall within these markers must necessarily accept, by implication, a lesser participation and say in public affairs.

If citizenship is the right to have rights, majoritarianism based on religion and language seems determined to deny some rights to those who do not conform to the larger projected identity.

Worldwide, the democracy project seems to have run aground.

Populations are now ruled by populists who exalt electoral victories above democratic governance. We have courts that have now ceased to see constitutional limitations as the guardrails of power. Constitutional provisions are now interpreted as mere enablers and enhancers of power rather than as brakes and safety valves against despotism.

It was prescient of Justice Learned Hand to warn, “I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes.”

It is against this backdrop that we must renew our constitutional vows.

The Constitution is not merely a little red book to be waved at political rallies.

It is not just a manual of instructions constituting an operating system for the administrative functioning of various organs of state.

It is not a holy book whose indecipherable meanings are revealed after much debate by black-robed priests at some high temple on Delhi’s Bhagwandas Road.

The Indian Constitution is all this — but is yet something more.

The core of the Constitution lies in a solemn compact between citizen and citizen in a democratic country to protect its sovereign independence as a nation and to ensure freedom within the country. The compact is of fraternity, which is based on liberty and equality.

Our creed, as Indians, says all Indians are brothers and sisters. That the poorest, most humble Indian stands as an equal brother or sister to the richest and most powerful person in the land. That each citizen realises that his rights are co-equal and dependent on the exercise of the rights of every other citizen. That each citizen has a duty to defend his brothers rights against any abridgment or negation by the state or by other fellow citizens.

We are not just Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Christians, Parsis, Jains, Jews, atheists and agnostics forced by circumstance to share a common geography, but are all Indians who share a common dream of a nation that assures political, social and economic justice.

It is in the pursuit of this dream that the Constitution has served as a beacon to the last, the least and the lost.

It was the tribals of the Pathalgadi movement in Jharkhand who painted their constitutional rights on stones outside their villages as a reminder to officials that they too were citizens.

It was three girls in a junior college in Udupi who asserted their constitutionally protected right to wear hijabs to class.

It was the protestors in Shaheen Bagh and other spots who told the government that it could not discriminate among religions in the grant of citizenship.

It was the farmers protesting on the borders of the national capital who asserted that corporatising agriculture could not be at the cost of their farms.

In these and other cases, the Constitution was both a pointed sword of assertion and a broad shield of protection.

For a society brought up on ‘Karmanye vaadhikaarasthe’ — a doctrine where one is expected to perform one’s duty without expectation of reward — the Constitution’s emphasis on individual rights and collective fraternity is a revolutionary doctrine.

It is also worthwhile to recollect that the constitutional dream was born against a nightmarish decade of violence prior to its signing. World War II, the Jewish Holocaust, the dropping of atom bombs, the million lives lost in Partition violence and the murder of the Mahatma all influenced the debates in the Constituent Assembly.

The resultant document must also be seen as a survivors’ covenant to not again go down the violent courses of the past. Three generations later, we may have forgotten some of those lessons, but we must continue to reaffirm Justice Sudhanshu Dhulia’s dictum that our Constitution was born out of love, not hate.

In 1787, as the last members of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia were signing the document of the US Constitution, Benjamin Franklin looked towards the President’s chair (George Washington’s chair), on the back of which was painted a rising sun. He observed to a few members near him that the painters had found it difficult to distinguish in their art a rising sun from a setting sun.

He said: “I have often and often in the course of the Session, and the vicissitudes of my hopes and fears as to its issue, looked at that behind the President without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting: But now at length I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting sun.”

It’s time for us to figure whether the sun is rising or setting on constitutionalism in India.

Jai Hind, Jai Samvidhan, Jai Bhim!