Ideas for India: Effort is the critical investment

In times such as these, we must remember we are citizens, not subjects.

The difference boils down to one fact: we are not being ruled, merely governed.

Other than voting, we have the right—the fundamental right, it must be stressed—to voice our opinion and to spread it. That right must be exercised.

We have the right to engage with the justice system. That must be used, to pressure the government into action and into pausing where it is going so recklessly.

Civil society—meaning all the space and all the institutions between the family and the government—can and must mobilise so that this pressure on the government is kept up every time it abandons secularism and pluralism.

The State in India has little interest in constitutionalism.

No awards are given to individuals who stand for it. Neither the judiciary nor the system punishes errant and often even criminal behaviour.

The State can, for example, harass activists with bogus cases and there will be no punitive action against those who did the framing. Such things as wrongful detention, excessive use of force, harassment and malicious action by the State are not penalised.

Civil society must get the State to be more invested in constitutionalism. We have to ensure that where the State and its agents bend or break the law or the values of the Constitution, they are held to account and called out.

These attempts may fail, and that is fine. Structural change requires construction at the foundation.

Effort is the critical investment. Results will follow.

Constitutional space has been given to us. Even if it has been severely restricted over time, it exists. That space needs to be appropriated in a way that it has not been so far, especially not by the urban middle class.

And it has to be expanded. We have to fray the ‘reasonable restrictions’, we have to unravel them and we have to let the true meaning of 'fundamental rights' shine through.

Progress on rights is inevitable. History is with the progressives; the future is also with us.

Conservatives seek to conserve a past that is not possible to hold on to. Change is inevitable and constant, and the arc of the moral universe is headed in the direction of progress on individual rights and dignity.

Our task is to hasten the arc along on its path towards justice.

AAKAR PATEL is a journalist, activist, author and former chair of Amnesty India. Views are personal