Hyderabad: India is celebrating 70 years as a Constitutional Republic at a momentous period. Mass protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC) across the country have seen the repeated invocation of the Constitution of India. It is hard to recall any period in India’s independent history when the Constitution became such a galvanising force and the lodestar of a popular movement.
Over the last couple of months, we have witnessed the stirring sights of the Preamble to the Constitution being collectively read out by thousands of people across various protest sites. The Anti-CAA-NRC protests have done more for popularizing the Constitution of India than many tedious and dreary efforts by governments, judiciary and educational institutions over the years. This, by itself, is a lasting contribution of the ongoing public protests in India.
But what does the invocation of the Constitution imply? Is it merely a symbolic gesture or a tactical move that reaffirms an allegiance to India to tide over religious differences? Why was the image of Chandrasekhar Azad emerging on the steps of Jama Masjid with the Constitution held high a defining moment for the agitation? Are these actions merely a ritualistic reverence to Dr Ambedkar and the Constitution? While there might be tactical and ritualistic tendencies in some of these invocations, the protests are fundamentally based on substantive constitutional values.
The Constitution is increasingly being referred to today because there is a strong perception that it faces an existential threat. A threat of it being extinguished, not necessarily in a formal manner, but hollowed out by a thousand cuts, through multiple legislative and executive actions of the government.
The appeal to the Constitution is then an appeal to the core values underlying this document. It is an assertion of the idea that India is the Constitutional Republic and not just an electoral democracy. The fact that such widespread public protests emerged barely half a year after the most decisive electoral mandate in 35 years shows that the underpinnings of a constitutional republic are distinct from those of procedural, majoritarian democracy. As India completes 70 years as a constitutional republic, it is this distinctive constitutional values that we must recall, reflect and reaffirm.
From the Preamble of the Constitution, we understand that India is both a democracy and a republic. The republican nature of India’s constitution is not, as commonly understood, restricted to the idea that the head of the state and government are popularly elected and not a hereditary monarch. India is a constitutional republic, and not just a democracy because it possesses certain norms and institutions that promote and protect a set of foundational values that go beyond the principle of electoral democracy.
These norms and values are best captured in the core aims of the Constitution as stated in the Preamble: Justice, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. While democracy is a system of government where power is exercised by people who are popularly elected, a Constitutional Republic ensures that this power is exercised as per certain rules.
Hence, what the Constitution seeks to achieve is not merely the creation and exercise of legitimate political authority but also constrain the actions of such authority for the sake of protecting certain fundamental values. Speaking in the Constituent Assembly on 17 September 1949, Dr B.R. Ambedkar explained: “the purpose of a Constitution is not merely to create the organs of the State but to limit their authority because if no limitation was imposed upon the authority of the organs, there will be complete tyranny and complete oppression.”
Here Ambedkar is essentially expounding the concept of constitutionalism, the idea that the state should be legally constrained in exercising powers and its legitimacy is derived from respecting such limitations. Hence, a Constitutional Republic seeks to limit the scope of the actions of a democratically elected government.
While the core aim of a democracy is to further 'the will of the people', a constitutional republic also seeks to protect people from what is often called as the tyranny of the majority'. The Indian constitution offers a set of Fundamental Rights that no government, even with the biggest mandate, can deny its citizens. The Constitutional Republic requires the state to follow certain norms like the adherence to the rule of law, the protection of individual liberty, the equal treatment of citizens and the freedom from the arbitrary exercise of power.
It is when these constitutional values are under threat, that the efforts to reassert and reclaim them gain public fervour. The protests against CAA and NRC is one of those rare moments when these seemingly abstract principles are given life and meaning through various forms of public expression.
The Constitution of India is now emerging out of the confines of lawyers, judges, scholars and state officials and essentially becoming a document of the people. The lack of a strong civic educational system in India has not prevented people from reclaiming the ideas of the Constitution in creative ways.
It is the spread of such a constitutional culture that most aptly captures the spirit of the Republic Day, and not the paraphernalia surrounding the Republic Day Parade or even the narrow legal interpretations of constitutional provisions. For preserving the hard-fought values enshrined in the Constitution, it is important for people to collectively challenge the threats these values face at all forums, from the streets to the courts.
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