Shashi Tharoor writes: Constitution will prevail as long as its spirit survives in ordinary citizens of India

The relation of constitutionalism successful shaping the “idea of India” is the ascendant strand successful the broader communicative of the improvement and modernisation of Indian society, particularly implicit the past 2 centuries. Every nine has an inter-dependent narration with the ineligible systems that govern it, which is some analyzable and, particularly successful our tumultuous times, endlessly and vociferously contested.

Challenging it contiguous are galore unsafe trends — the hollowing retired of our antiauthoritarian institutions, the hijacking of our investigative agencies, the disempowerment of our quality media, the pressures connected the judiciary and adjacent the ineligible fraternity, and the blatant communalisation of our authorities and nationalist life. All of these correspond our constitution makers’ worst fears.

Over the past decade, the Constitution and the values it embodies — particularly those of liberty, equality, and fraternity, each woven unneurotic by secular pluralism — person been threatened. Its astir seminal publication to the “idea of India”, that of the primacy of liberty and autonomy, and of the idiosyncratic national being the existent custodian of her Republic, has been brutalised. Dissent successful peculiar has been villainised arsenic anti-national, with dissidents charged nether draconian anti-terrorism laws, which crook the process into the punishment. This ensures that an undertrial languishes endlessly successful situation earlier — arsenic has occurred successful 97 per cent of the cases filed nether the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) — being acquitted for deficiency of evidence. While we mislaid some Father Stan Swamy (an infirm, 84-year-old Jesuit priest) and Professor G N Saibaba (a wheelchair idiosyncratic with implicit 90 per cent disability), whose deaths stay a blot connected our corporate conscience, to the UAPA, young Umar Khalid has spent much than 4 years successful jailhouse acknowledgment to this draconian law.

Ambedkar saw the principles of wide constitutionalism — the centrality and secularity of the state, idiosyncratic liberty and the close to law remedies, non-communal governmental practice — arsenic cures for the conundrums thrown up by imposing a wide Constitution upon an illiberal society. Constitutions are, archetypal and foremost, arsenic Ambedkar explicitly stressed, tools to bounds and restrain authorities power. The situation lies successful reconciling the limitations to authorities powerfulness with a fashionable mandate, frankincense preventing impermanent majorities — due to the fact that successful a democracy, a bulk is ever temporary, though governments sometimes hide that — from wholly undoing what the Constitution has provided. The founders of the Indian republic disquieted astir ideology becoming an elections-only affair, and of a fashionable mandate degenerating into majoritarianism. In the Constituent Assembly, the Prime Minister and Home Minister of the time, Nehru and Patel, went to large lengths to bounds their ain powerfulness — a thought simply unimaginable today.

As Ambedkar enactment it — and arsenic galore of america successful the Opposition person agelong been saying — the rights of Indians cannot “be taken distant by immoderate legislature simply due to the fact that it happens to person a majority”. After all, our quest for state was not simply a conflict for state from assemblage subjugation. It embraced “constitutional morality”, a committedness to law means, processes and structures, alongside a committedness to escaped speech, scrutiny of nationalist enactment and ineligible limitations connected the workout of power. Only if each citizens embraced this could state flourish successful India.

Ambedkar warned that it is wholly imaginable to pervert the Constitution —without changing it — by simply changing the signifier and functioning of the medication to marque it antithetical to the tone of the Constitution. Ambedkar argued that “Constitutional morality is not a earthy sentiment. It has to beryllium cultivated… Democracy successful India is lone a apical dressing connected an Indian ungraded which is fundamentally undemocratic.” He insisted that the Directive Principles of State Policy were indispensable due to the fact that though the rules of ideology mandate that the radical indispensable elite their representatives, who wield power, the Principles reaffirm that “whoever captures powerfulness volition not beryllium escaped to bash what helium likes with it.”

Today, our Constitution’s pluralist, progressive, and peaceful thought of India faces galore perils, arsenic bash the institutions and watchdogs entrusted with safeguarding it and fending against authoritarian impulses and brute majoritarianism. Over the past decade, concerted efforts person been made to trim our Parliament from a vigorous forum of deliberation and dialog to a notice-board and rubber stamp for the ruling party’s agenda. The Supreme Court has seemed to slacken arsenic well, losing the progressive zeal that animated the judgments recognising the Right to Privacy and decriminalising homosexuality; it has done small to clasp an overweening enforcement to relationship and support idiosyncratic liberties, fto unsocial beforehand them. Add to this the weaponisation of investigative agencies (such arsenic the ED, CBI and Income Tax Department) against governmental opponents and dissidents, and the battering into submission of the Election Commission, and we person a crippling situation of fearfulness that undermines the regularisation of the Constitution.

But determination is nary crushed to suffer hope. Over the past 5 years, democracy- and liberty-loving citizens of India person risen to reclaim our Republic. Rescuing the Constitution of India from the highbrow preserves of courtrooms, ineligible chambers, and instrumentality schools, they person mobilised it and sent it into battle. In the biting acold of December 2019 and aboriginal 2020, lakhs of Indians crossed the state — from youngsters and students to the aged yet indomitable women of Shaheen Bagh — poured into the streets successful protestation against the appalling Citizenship Amendment Act and National Register of Citizens, which gave ineligible colour to the two-nation theory. On those freezing nights wrapped successful fog, countless Indians of each faiths and castes, speaking galore languages, held aloft portraits of Ambedkar, Gandhi, and Nehru and chanted the Preamble successful unison — arsenic 1 people. As the electrifying outcry of “We, the People of India …” ripped done the darkness, the “idea of India” roared backmost to life, revitalising our Republic and promising to awaken america into that “Heaven of Freedom” Tagore wrote truthful inspiringly about.

The Constitution volition prevail arsenic agelong arsenic its tone survives successful the mean citizens of India.

The writer is MP, Lok Sabha