The lodestar of We, the people

On November 26, 75 years ago, the members of the Constituent Assembly (CA) passed a resolution approving the Constitution they had drafted under the leadership of Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar. It became the founding document of the new Republic that came into being on January 26, 1950. Since then, it has served as the lodestar for “We, the people”, in whose name it was proposed and approved.

In over seven decades, the world’s longest-written Constitution, often spoken of as a work in progress — there have been 106 amendments to the document in 75 years – has held together a country riven by multiple fault lines. The ideals of equality, liberty and fraternity, highlighted in the Preamble, have guided political parties of different ideologies that have been in office. It has been the reference book for the judiciary to step in when the legislature or executive strays. The basic structure doctrine proposed by the Supreme Court in 1973 underlines that the constitutional ideals form the bedrock of the Republic and warns against disturbing that foundation. The Lok Sabha Speaker, Om Birla, wrote in these pages that “its (the Indian Constitution) continuing relevance in a large, diverse, and fast-changing world is the judicious balance that the framers of the Constitution were able to strike between rigidity and flexibility by ring-fencing those provisions which in their view required careful consideration and wider consensus.”

For a country that had faced the brunt of colonialism and imperialism since 1857 when this land came under the British crown and a society that had been weighed down by the inhuman social order perpetrated by the caste system, freedom in 1947, the (then) risky gamble of universalising franchise, and an idealistic Constitution that followed were truly liberating. The making of the Indian Constitution itself was a grand project. Its members represented the religious, linguistic, ethnic, social, regional, and political diversity of the nation. Each provision (395 Articles, organised into 25 Parts and 12 Schedules) was formulated after extensive debates and the outcome was a remarkable document for multiple reasons. A Constituent Assembly mostly composed of people drawn from the privileged sections of the society agreed on a vision that offered a view from below, privileged individual rights over communal privileges, and secured the rights of minorities. It established a social and political democracy based on the principle of one person, one vote, one value.

Continuing incidents of social violence — centred on caste, faith, gender, and wealth — suggest that the ideals of the Constitution are far from being realised. But blame not the document for our failure, hold those responsible for its implementation accountable. The future life of the Constitution, and of the Republic itself, hinges on we, the people, our political agents, and our institutions imbibing the letter, spirit, and intent of the document and working to realise its ideals.

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