Social and Political Perspectives on the Indian Constitution

The Constitution was contested from the day it was adopted, and by people who agreed on almost nothing else. Gandhians attacked it for being too Western, Marxists for protecting property, liberals for its emergency powers, Hindu traditionalists for ignoring indigenous tradition, and Ambedkar — who steered it through the House — warned within a fortnight of finishing it that it might not survive the people asked to work it. Understanding the Constitution means understanding those quarrels, because the document is the record of how they were settled.

Austin’s thesis: a social document

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“Making of the constitution was a coming together of ‘national’ and ‘social’ revolutions respectively. The national revolution focused on democracy and liberty, which the experience of colonial rule had denied to all Indians, whereas the social revolution focused on emancipation and equality, which tradition and scripture had withheld from women and low castes.” — Granville Austin

• Granville Austin’s reading remains the standard one, and it rests on a single claim: the Indian Constitution is first and foremost a social document.
  • The majority of its provisions are aimed either directly at furthering the goals of social revolution, or at establishing the conditions under which that revolution becomes possible.
  • This distinguishes it from constitutions whose task is to limit an existing state; India’s was written to construct a society as well as a state.
• The seamless web is his organising image, and it has three strands.
  • National unity and integrity — holding together a territory partitioned, plural and newly assembled.
  • Democratic institutions — representative government on adult suffrage, justiciable rights, an independent judiciary.
  • Social revolution — the transformation of a hierarchical society, pursued through Part IV and the equality provisions of Part III.
  • The strands are not separable: pursuing any one at the cost of the others damages all three, which is Austin’s explanation both of the Constitution’s durability and of its periodic crises.
• “Cornerstone of a nation” is a claim, not a compliment.
  • Austin’s point is that in 1950 the nation did not yet exist in any settled sense, and the Constitution was to be the foundation on which one would be built.
  • A cornerstone bears weight it does not itself create: the document supplied instruments, not the social change. Article 17 did not end untouchability, and Part IV was made non-justiciable precisely so that its promises would not bind.
  • The honest verdict is that the foundation proved sound while the building remains unfinished.
• The standard critique of Austin is that the seamless-web image smooths over contradictions the Assembly actually left unresolved — most obviously between property rights and redistribution — and that his access to Congress sources produced a sympathetic reading of the leadership’s choices.

The great debates inside the Assembly

The village, and the Gandhian objection

• Ambedkar was implacably against the idea of village republics, holding that building the polity on them would ruin India.
  • His formulation is the most quoted line of the debates: “What is the village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism?”
  • His objection was not administrative but sociological — the village is where caste power is most concentrated and least visible, so decentralisation to it hands power to precisely the hierarchy the Constitution was meant to dismantle.
• Gandhi’s conception was the opposite, and it had wide support in the movement if not in the Assembly.
  • The village as a self-contained, self-reliant unit, with the panchayat as the base of a structure of indirect and decentralised government — his oceanic circles, built upward rather than downward.
  • This is a republican and participatory conception of democracy with communitarian leanings, and it runs directly against modern representative models.
• The Assembly’s broad consensus on parliamentary government placed the Gandhian model on the periphery, and the compromise was Article 40 — a directive to organise village panchayats, placed in the non-justiciable Part IV over Ambedkar’s objection.
• Members from the movement’s own tradition felt the loss keenly.
  • Mahavir Tyagi complained that there was “nothing Gandhian” in the Constitution.
  • K. Hanumanthaiya put it most memorably: freedom fighters had wanted “the music of Veena or Sitar” and got instead “the music of an English band.”
• The Gandhian claim was partly vindicated forty-two years later. The 73rd and 74th Amendments in 1992 gave panchayats and municipalities constitutional status, mandatory elections, reserved seats and a State Finance Commission — though functions, funds and functionaries remain with the states, so the vindication is incomplete.

The unitary bias

• K. Santhanam of Madras made the sharpest attack on the fiscal provisions, warning that they would make the provinces “beggars at the door of the Centre.”
• The answer from the floor was frankly circumstantial: a strong centre was an absolute imperative in times of stress and strain, and only a strong centre could plan for the well-being of the country as a whole.
• The leadership was unapologetic.
  • Ambedkar told the House he wanted a strong united centre, stronger than the one created under the Government of India Act 1935.
  • K. M. Munshi argued for a federation with a centre as strong as we can make it.
• The result is what K. C. Wheare called a quasi-federal constitution: a federal division of powers with Articles 352, 356 and 360, Article 249, a single judiciary, All India Services and central appointment of Governors layered over it.
• The fiscal criticism has proved the most durable of the Assembly’s unresolved questions, running from the first Finance Commission through the Sarkaria and Punchhi Commissions to the arguments over vertical devolution, cess and surcharge, and the compensation settlement after GST in 2017.

Minority rights and separate electorates

• B. Pocker Bahadur made a vigorous plea for retaining separate electorates, arguing that it was very difficult for non-Muslims to realise the needs and requirements of the Muslim community, and that abolishing them would leave important groups feeling they had no adequate voice in the governance of the country.
• Sardar Patel was the most forceful voice on the other side, and his answer was uncompromising: such a system had already led to the division of the country, and those who wanted it had “a place in Pakistan, not here.” Here, he said, the foundations of One Nation were being laid.
• Some of the strongest opposition came from Muslim members themselves. Begum Aizaz Rasul called separate electorates “absolutely meaningless” and a “self-destructive weapon” that separates the minorities from the majority for all time.
• The Advisory Committee reversed itself in 1949 and dropped reservation of seats for religious minorities altogether, retaining it only for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes; Nehru told the Assembly this was “the right thing to do.”
• The interpretations of that reversal diverge sharply.
  • Rochana Bajpai reads it as a moment of containment — group rights admitted in a narrow, temporary and welfare-framed form rather than as a claim of political equality.
  • The alternative reading is that it was among the most ambitious attempts at realigning the cultural fault lines between castes and communities, undertaken alongside the construction of a postcolonial welfare state, in which community was reinterpreted as an empirical fact rather than a political unit.
• The asymmetry it created is the live question.
  • Caste-based affirmative action was written into the Constitution; the position of religious minorities was left to the goodwill of Indian secularism.
  • This is why demands for including Muslims and Christians in backward-class benefits, and for Dalit Muslims and Dalit Christians in the Scheduled Caste list, keep returning.

Where the reservation principle came from

The Assembly did not invent its answer to group representation. It inherited a principle worked out across sixteen years of negotiation between caste and community bodies, and its own contribution was to decide which parts of that inheritance to keep.

• The Lucknow Pact of 1916 was the first and last successful agreement between the Congress and the Muslim League, and it turned on the artefact of reservation of seats — over and above population share for Muslims in minority provinces, with separate electorates retained.
  • Tilak was an enthusiastic backer, and the Pact also healed the Surat split of 1907 by bringing Moderates and Extremists back together.
  • It fell apart within a decade, but it established the principle that would be argued over ever after.
• The Nehru Report negotiations of 1928 collapsed on the same principle, and for an unexpected reason.
  • The Central Sikh League, the subcontinent’s first regional party, demanded thirty per cent of Punjab seats against a population share of about eleven, on the argument that where more than one minority exists a majority in numbers becomes a minority in representation.
  • Motilal Nehru had not anticipated this, and the All Parties Convention could not even agree on what the word minority meant — at one point substituting small minorities with the intention of confining it to Muslim minorities.
  • The Report eventually did away with reservation altogether, and the dialogue ended with Jinnah’s Fourteen Points.
• The Poona Pact of September 1932 is the direct constitutional ancestor of reservation as India practises it.
  • The Communal Award had granted the Depressed Classes separate electorates; Gandhi’s fast at Yerwada and the negotiation with Ambedkar converted that into reserved seats within a joint electorate, with a larger number of seats than the Award had given.
  • Ambedkar’s own reasons for agreeing were not merely the fast: Gandhi had acknowledged him as the representative of the Depressed Classes, had conceded the principle of reservation of seats he had refused in London, and Ambedkar was himself dissatisfied with the Award.
  • The basic principle of that agreement — reservation of seats for castes — is what found its way into the constitution of independent India, in Articles 330 and 332.
• The Unity Conference at Allahabad in late 1932 was the last such gathering, and its failure closed the phase.
  • Presided over by C. Vijayaraghavachariar and organised by Madan Mohan Malaviya and Shaukat Ali, it drafted a text protecting personal laws and allotting seat shares in Bengal and Punjab, with twenty per cent for the Sikhs against the thirty they had demanded.
  • The draft required ratification by regional community bodies, ran into a series of amendments, and collapsed — after which the Government of India Act 1935 was introduced carrying the Communal Award as modified by the Poona Pact.
• The Assembly’s settlement in 1949 is best read against this history.
  • It scrapped reservation of seats for religious communities and retained it for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, declaring that representation would otherwise be on purely national lines.
  • It thereby resolved by constitutional fiat a question that sixteen years of negotiation had failed to settle by agreement — which is both the Assembly’s achievement and the ground of the criticism that it decided rather than persuaded.

Women’s representation

• Hansa Mehta of Bombay rejected both reserved seats and separate electorates, in one of the most striking speeches of the debates.
  • “We have never asked for privileges. What we have asked for is social justice, economic justice, and political justice. We have asked for that equality which alone can be the basis of mutual respect and understanding and without which real co-operation is not possible between man and woman.”
• Renuka Ray of Bengal made the same argument historically: unlike the narrow suffragist movement of many so-called enlightened nations, the women of India had striven for equality of status, justice and fair play, and had been fundamentally opposed to special privileges and reservations since the movement began.
• The position was principled and it had a cost. Women’s representation in the Lok Sabha remained below fifteen per cent for most of the republic’s history, and the argument the framers’ generation rejected has since been made by the women’s movement itself.
• The question returned and was answered differently.
  • The 106th Amendment, passed in September 2023, inserts Articles 330A, 332A and 239AA(2) to reserve one-third of seats in the Lok Sabha, state assemblies and the Delhi assembly for women.
  • It carries sub-reservation for SC and ST women and a fifteen-year sunset, with rotation of reserved seats.
  • It is contingent on a census and delimitation and therefore not yet in force — its own comment on how long the option the framers’ generation rejected has taken to become law.

Civil liberties and preventive detention

• Somnath Lahiri produced the sharpest internal criticism of Part III, remarking that many of the fundamental rights had been framed from the point of view of a police constable — that is, drafted around the exceptions rather than the freedoms.
• Preventive detention attracted the most concentrated hostility. A veteran freedom fighter called detention without trial “the darkest blot on the Indian Constitution”, and Ambedkar defended Article 22 with visible discomfort.
• The liberal objection has three parts, all of which the Assembly heard and overrode: the extent of emergency powers, the ease of amendment under Article 368 as originally drafted, and preventive detention written into the rights chapter itself.

Property, and the first constitutional crisis

• K. T. Shah pressed the most doctrinaire socialist position in the Assembly, favouring state ownership and control of natural resources and large-scale industry, progressive nationalisation, and a time limit within which all Directive Principles would be made justiciable.
  • His proposals were not adopted, but they matter as evidence that the Assembly contained a radical departure from the liberal language in which its debates are usually described.
• Ambedkar’s own economic position was more socialist than Nehru’s on the record.
  • His memorandum States and Minorities proposed a time-bound programme of social reconstruction — nationalisation of land and industry, insurance as a state monopoly, and every citizen covered by compulsory social insurance.
  • The Assembly declined, on the ground that such matters were better left to legislation than written into a constitution.
• The compromise reached on property produced the republic’s first constitutional crisis.
  • Zamindari abolition was struck at in the courts, and the First Amendment (1951) created the Ninth Schedule to shield land reform laws from review.
  • The question then ran through Golak Nath, Kesavananda and the 44th Amendment (1978), which removed property from Part III altogether and made it a constitutional right under Article 300A.
• The Marxist charge takes its evidence from exactly this sequence: formal equality guaranteed, property protected, and the socio-economic commitments parked in the non-justiciable Part IV — which, on this reading, reflects the class composition of both the movement and the Assembly.

Language and personal law

• The language settlement was the Assembly’s hardest single negotiation.
  • It was resolved by the Munshi-Ayyangar formula: Hindi in Devanagari as the official language under Article 343, English continuing for fifteen years, and Article 351 directing the Union to promote Hindi’s spread.
  • Ambedkar favoured Hindi as the compulsory official language at both Union and State levels, on the ground that regional options would make united administration impossible.
  • The compromise held only because the fifteen-year deadline was never enforced, after the anti-Hindi agitations in Madras and the Official Languages Act 1963 and its 1967 amendment made English’s continuance open-ended.
• Personal law was the settlement the Assembly did not attempt.
  • Article 44 placed a uniform civil code in Part IV as a directive, not a command.
  • Ambedkar’s position was more careful than either side now claims: he supported a uniform code in principle and opposed enforcing it on unwilling citizens, suggesting it could begin as purely voluntary, as the Shariat Act of 1937 had done.
  • He also demolished the claim that Muslim personal law was immutable and uniform, pointing out that until 1937 Muslims in large parts of India, and in the North-West Frontier Province until 1939, were governed by Hindu law in matters of succession, and that in North Malabar a matriarchal law applied irrespective of religion.
  • His warning on protecting personal law from social legislation was blunt: if that were done, social legislation would become impossible and in the matter of social justice the country would come to a standstill.

Forging a common national identity out of unparalleled diversity

The framers were writing for a society more plural than any constitution had previously attempted to hold together, immediately after that plurality had produced partition. Their solutions are the clearest evidence of what they thought a nation was.

• Single citizenship was the foundational choice, and it was made against the federal grain.
  • India adopted federalism and refused dual citizenship, unlike the United States or Switzerland, so no one is a citizen of a state as well as of the Union.
  • The corollaries are Articles 15 and 16, which bar discrimination on grounds of place of birth and residence, and Article 19(1)(d) and (e), guaranteeing the right to move and settle anywhere in the territory.
• A common electoral roll under Article 325 was the sharpest break with the colonial order, and the reason the abolition of separate electorates mattered so much: nobody is placed on a special roll on grounds of religion, race, caste or sex.
• Asymmetric federalism was the counterpart concession, and the framers used it liberally rather than treating uniformity as a principle.
  • The Sixth Schedule for tribal areas of the north-east, the Fifth Schedule for scheduled areas elsewhere, and the special provisions of Articles 371A to 371J for Nagaland, Mizoram, Sikkim, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka.
  • Article 370 for Jammu and Kashmir, described in the text and in the Assembly as a temporary provision — the basis on which its abrogation in 2019 was upheld in December 2023.
• The language settlement was accommodation rather than resolution, and its durability comes from having deferred the decision rather than made it.
• The reorganisation of states on linguistic lines, resisted immediately after partition and conceded from 1953, is the strongest evidence that the framers’ unity was not uniformity.
  • The States Reorganisation Act 1956 redrew the map on the principle the Nehru Report had proposed in 1928, and the widely predicted disintegration did not follow.
  • Language became the basis of state formation and did not become the basis of secession, which is the single most important comparative fact about Indian federalism.
• Fraternity is the objective the Preamble names and the Constitution cannot enforce. It carries no institutional guarantee, and Ambedkar treated it as the hardest and most necessary of the three principles precisely for that reason — liberty and equality without it require, in his phrase, a constable.

Concerns about social inequality

The framers’ response to inequality is spread across the document rather than concentrated in one part, and reading the provisions together shows how deliberate the design was.

• Ambedkar’s diagnosis is what these provisions were answering. Indian society rests on graded inequality — not a simple division of high and low but an ascending scale of reverence and descending scale of contempt, in which each stratum has an interest in the stratum below remaining where it is.
  • That structure is why he thought equality could not be left to social reform: only the state, using law, could disturb it, because every intermediate group benefited from leaving it undisturbed.
• The Objectives Resolution had already committed the Assembly to adequate safeguards for minorities, backward and tribal areas, and depressed and other backward classes, before any of these articles were drafted.
• The ordering inside the Preamble is itself an argument. Justice is listed as social, economic and political — social first — and the sequence is a claim: political justice without social justice is unstable, which is the whole of Ambedkar’s warning about the life of contradictions.
• The critical reading is that the design was strong on formal equality and deliberately weak on substantive equality.
  • The redistributive commitments went into the non-justiciable Part IV while the property right went into Part III.
  • The subsequent history of Indian equality jurisprudence is largely the story of courts trying to close that gap.

The Preamble and the status of its values

• The Preamble states four things: the source of authority in We, the People of India; the nature of the state; the objectives; and the date of adoption, 26 November 1949.
• Its legal status was contested and is now settled.
  • Berubari Union (1960) held that the Preamble is not part of the Constitution, though it could aid interpretation where a provision was ambiguous.
  • Kesavananda Bharati (1973) reversed this, holding that the Preamble is part of the Constitution, having been adopted by a motion which said so, and made its content central to identifying the basic structure.
  • LIC of India (1995) called it an integral part of the document.
• The words socialist and secular were inserted by the 42nd Amendment in 1976, along with the change from unity to unity and integrity of the Nation.
  • The analytically important point is that both were already present in substance — secularism in Articles 25 to 28 and the equality provisions, socialism in Part IV — so the amendment made explicit what the courts had already been reading in.
  • The fact that the Preamble has been amended at all establishes that it is part of the Constitution, since Article 368 reaches only the Constitution.

The ideological positions inside the Assembly

Rajeev Bhargava identifies at least five competing ideological positions in the Constituent Assembly, and reading the document as the resultant of these forces explains more than reading it as a single vision.

• Ambedkar and Nehru together set the document’s ideological contours, and the Gandhian vision — for all its authority in the movement — found little reflection in the text.
• What distinguishes Nehru from Ambedkar, in Bhikhu Parekh’s reading, is the emphasis on socialism: for Nehru, socialism alongside democracy, national unity, industrialisation, scientific temper, secularism and non-alignment constituted the national philosophy of India.
• V. R. Mehta’s judgment on Gandhi is worth holding: he was not only a man of action but a prophet of modern India who achieved a national aggregation of an all-India character for the first time — and his thinking does not appear in the Constitution of the country he did most to free.
• The Hindu traditionalist strand had no organisational presence — neither the Hindu Mahasabha nor the RSS had representatives as such — but operated effectively as a pressure group through individual members, and won on cow protection, on Hindi and Sanskrit, and lost on Article 370.

Three ways of reading the Constitution, and a fourth

Bhargava distinguishes the existing approaches to studying the Constitution, and finds each incomplete.

• Bhargava’s ground for a fourth approach is that the existing scholarship is deficient in three ways: insufficient elaboration of the Constitution’s conceptual structure; inadequate grasp of the structure of the ideals embedded in it; and a disconnect between reading the Constitution and reading the Constituent Assembly Debates.
• The practical consequence is that concepts like secularism, fraternity and dignity are treated as slogans rather than as worked-out positions — when the debates show the framers arguing about them with considerable philosophical precision.

The perspectives, set against each other

• The Ambedkarite position deserves particular care, because it is routinely simplified in both directions.
  • Ambedkar defended the document as the best available, and defended it against the Communists and Socialists in his final speech.
  • He also warned that a constitution is only as good as those who work it, that political democracy on an unequal social base is a life of contradictions, and that the people must abandon the grammar of anarchy and hero-worship.
  • His 1953 remark in the Rajya Sabha that he would be the first to burn the Constitution is usually quoted without its context: the failure of the Hindu Code Bill and his frustration at the treatment of minorities, not a repudiation of the text.
• A useful structural frame for the whole argument distinguishes two visions that contended from the Lucknow Pact of 1916 to the Assembly itself.
  • “Constitution through nation” — the Congress position that swaraj came first and everything else after.
  • “Nation through constitution” — the position of caste and community discourses that agreement on the constitution had to come first, because without it independence merely transferred power to those already dominant.
  • Ambedkar’s version of the second was exact: “without the removal of the taint of untouchability Swaraj is a meaningless term.”
  • Gandhi’s version of the first was equally exact: the agreed solution of the communal tangle could only be a crown of the swaraj constitution, not its foundation.
  • The two visions never reconciled, and partition is what settled the argument rather than any constitutional formula.

Ambedkar’s closing address: the Grammar of Anarchy

On 25 November 1949, the day before the Constitution was adopted, Ambedkar delivered the speech that has become the most quoted single text on the Indian Constitution.

On judging a constitution

“However good a Constitution may be, it is sure to turn out bad because those who are called to work it, happen to be a bad lot. However bad a Constitution may be, it may turn out to be good if those who are called to work it, happen to be a good lot.” — B. R. Ambedkar

• The argument is that a constitution’s working does not depend wholly on its own nature. The Constitution can provide only the organs of state — legislature, executive and judiciary — and how those organs behave depends on the people and the political parties they set up as their instruments.
• The question he leaves open is deliberately unanswerable: whether Indians will uphold constitutional methods or prefer revolutionary ones. If revolutionary methods are adopted, he says, it requires no prophet to predict that the Constitution will fail.
• It is therefore futile to pass judgment on the Constitution without reference to the part the people and their parties are likely to play — which is a warning against both triumphalism and premature condemnation.

On the critics

• He identified the condemnation as coming from two quarters: the Communist Party and the Socialist Party.
  • The Communists wanted a constitution based on the dictatorship of the proletariat, and condemned this one because it rests on parliamentary democracy.
  • The Socialists wanted freedom to nationalise private property without compensation if they came to power, and absolute fundamental rights without limitation if they did not — the latter, he noted pointedly, giving them unfettered freedom not merely to criticise but to overthrow the state.
• His reply was not that these positions are wrong but that the principles embodied in the Constitution are the views of the present generation, and he invoked Jefferson at length on the point.
  • “We may consider each generation as a distinct nation, with a right, by the will of the majority, to bind themselves, but none to bind the succeeding generation.”
  • Jefferson’s wider argument, which Ambedkar called absolutely true, is that the doctrine that institutions cannot be modified because of rights supposed in those who manage them may guard against a monarch’s abuses but is absurd against the nation itself — in short, that the earth belongs to the living and not the dead.
• His practical answer to both critics was the amendment procedure.
  • He challenged any critic to show a constituent assembly anywhere that had, in comparable circumstances, provided such a facile procedure for amendment.
  • Dissatisfaction that cannot muster a two-thirds majority in a Parliament elected on adult franchise cannot, he argued, be deemed to be shared by the general public.

The three warnings

• First, hold fast to constitutional methods.
  • Achieving social and economic objectives by constitutional means requires abandoning bloody revolution, and also abandoning civil disobedience, non-cooperation and satyagraha.
  • Where no constitutional route existed there was great justification for those methods; where constitutional methods are open, there is none. These methods are “nothing but the Grammar of Anarchy”, and the sooner they are abandoned the better.
• Second, refuse hero-worship.
  • He cited John Stuart Mill’s caution against laying one’s liberties at the feet of even a great man, or trusting him with power that enables him to subvert institutions, and the Irish patriot Daniel O’Connell on the limits of gratitude — that no nation can be grateful at the cost of its liberty.
  • The caution is more necessary in India than anywhere, because bhakti, the path of devotion, plays a part in Indian politics unequalled in magnitude anywhere in the world.

“Bhakti in religion may be a road to the salvation of the soul. But in politics, Bhakti or hero-worship is a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship.” — B. R. Ambedkar

• Third, do not be content with mere political democracy.
  • Political democracy cannot last unless there lies at the base of it social democracy — a way of life recognising liberty, equality and fraternity as principles of life rather than items in a document.
  • The three are a union of trinity, not separate items: liberty without equality produces the supremacy of the few, equality without liberty kills individual initiative, and without fraternity liberty and equality would require a constable to enforce them.

The life of contradictions

• He named the coming contradiction precisely, and the passage is the single most important thing said about the Constitution’s relation to Indian society.
  • On 26 January 1950 India would enter a life of contradictions: political equality and social and economic inequality; one man one vote and one vote one value in politics, and the continued denial of one man one value in social and economic life.
  • The warning attached is unambiguous: this contradiction must be removed at the earliest possible moment, or those who suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of political democracy the Assembly had laboriously built.
• On fraternity and nationhood he was equally unsparing.
  • Fraternity means a sense of common brotherhood giving unity and solidarity to social life, and India was wanting in it.
  • In believing that we are a nation, he said, we are cherishing a great delusion — how can a people divided into thousands of castes be a nation?
  • The sooner we realise we are not yet a nation in the social and psychological sense, the better, because only then will we take seriously the work of becoming one.
  • Castes are anti-national, both because they bring separation into social life and because they generate jealousy and antipathy between one caste and another. Without fraternity, equality and liberty will be no deeper than coats of paint.
• His closing warning was about the loss of an excuse.
  • By independence, he told the House, we have lost the excuse of blaming the British for anything that goes wrong; if things go wrong hereafter, we will have nobody to blame except ourselves.
  • He ended by observing that people were growing tired of government by the people and were increasingly content with government for the people — a preference that leads, unchecked, to the erosion of democracy from within.

The legitimacy debate and the case for a new constitution

The most radical version of the perspectives critique is that the document itself lacks legitimacy and should be replaced. The arguments are worth stating fully before they are answered.

The case for

• Modernisation and relevance. The Constitution is largely built on the Government of India Act 1935 and, on this view, no longer reflects the needs, values and aspirations of contemporary Indian society; it also carries a colonial legacy in its structure.
• Cultural and spiritual identity. India’s civilisational heritage is not fully reflected in a document heavily influenced by colonial legal frameworks; a new constitution could incorporate those dimensions and strengthen national identity.
• Global standing. As India asserts itself internationally, a new constitution could signal a renewed commitment to democratic principles, human rights and good governance.
• Judicial reform. Through the invention of the basic structure doctrine the judiciary has, on this argument, asserted its own supremacy and insulated itself from the checks that apply to the other organs; a fresh document could rebalance the relationship.
• The ambiguity argument. The text contains internal tensions — Right to Equality against freedom of religion in the uniform civil code debate, individual against community rights as in the Sabarimala litigation — and these have expanded the space for judicial interpretation at the expense of parliamentary supremacy.

The National Commission to Review the Working of the Constitution

• Set up in February 2000 by the National Democratic Alliance government under Atal Bihari Vajpayee, chaired by Justice M. N. Venkatachaliah, and reporting in 2002 in two volumes.
• Its principal recommendations covered almost every part of the Constitution.
  • Preventive detention capped at a maximum of six months under Article 22.
  • Sikhism, Buddhism and Jainism to be treated as separate religions under Article 25.
  • No arbitrary deprivation or acquisition of property, only by authority of law and for a public purpose, under Article 300A.
  • Legislators’ privileges to be defined and delimited; the MPLADS scheme discontinued.
  • A constructive vote of no confidence — a no-confidence motion against a Prime Minister to be accompanied by a proposal of an alternative leader, voted simultaneously.
  • Lateral entry into government service above joint secretary level.
  • Article 356 to be retained but used sparingly and only as a last resort, with the loss of confidence tested only on the floor of the House and no gubernatorial dismissal of a ministry that retains it.
  • A National Judicial Commission to recommend appointments to the Supreme Court; contempt powers confined to the Supreme Court and High Courts.
  • Greater financial autonomy for local government.
  • Disqualification of anyone charged with an offence punishable by five years or more; special courts for criminal cases against politicians; the model code of conduct given the force of law; a comprehensive law regulating political parties.
  • Defectors — individually or in groups — to resign and contest fresh elections, with the disqualification decision moved from the Speaker to the Election Commission.
• The Commission’s most significant finding is what it did not recommend. A body set up by a non-Congress government to review the Constitution proposed no far-reaching structural change and no new constituent assembly — which is the strongest available answer to the replacement argument.

The case against replacement

• The circumstances objection is anachronistic. Indirect election was a response to the absence of an electoral roll; holding direct elections first would have delayed independence itself.
• The Supreme Court has settled the authorship question. In Kesavananda Bharati it held that there is no point examining the factual correctness of “We, the People”; it is to be accepted as correct.
• Congress dominance was a fact about the country, not a defect of the Assembly. In Austin’s phrase, at the time of independence the Congress was India and India was Congress; the Hindu Mahasabha and Ambedkar’s own party won essentially nothing.
• The Congress co-opted its opponents so that the document would be a consensus rather than a party text, and invited submissions from the public at large.
• Most provisions were adopted by consensus rather than by majority, after extended debate — a contrast frequently drawn with constitutions carried by bare majorities elsewhere.
• The first general election is the natural experiment: the composition of the legislature elected in 1952 on universal franchise was not materially different, so a directly elected constituent body would not have produced a different document.
• Amendment frequency cuts both ways. A constitution that can be amended more than a hundred times without being replaced is demonstrating adaptability, and the basic structure doctrine is what has kept adaptability from becoming replacement by stealth.

Mehta’s answer

• Pratap Bhanu Mehta offers the strongest positive account of what the Constitution is.
  • It is a unique experiment in constitutionalism and not an ordinary document. Where other countries had revolutions that produced constitutions, India’s Constitution is itself revolutionary — the revolution began after independence, and India is the outstanding example of social revolution attempted through a constitution.
  • It is also a cosmopolitan constitution, grounded in universalist values and drawn from multiple traditions, situated at the crosscurrents of global constitutional law; Indian courts still reason from comparative material, and like Indian culture the document is syncretic and eclectic.
• Austin’s own formulation converges with this. The Constitution has become the nation’s foundation document, and, as he observed, some now call it the new dharmashastra — a phrase that concedes both its authority and the discomfort that authority produces.

The perspectives tested against seventy-five years

• On social revolution the record is genuinely mixed.
  • Article 17, reservation, land reform legislation, the Mandal extension of reservation to Other Backward Classes in 1990, and the 103rd Amendment (2019) extending it to the economically weaker sections are the instruments; the persistence of caste hierarchy is the counter-evidence.
  • Part IV has been progressively enforced by judicial route rather than by legislative choice — the right to education, the right to livelihood, environmental protection — which is the judiciary doing what the Assembly declined to make binding.
• On unity, the strand Austin thought most likely to be pursued at the others’ expense, the record runs both ways.
  • The accommodation of linguistic reorganisation from 1956 is the clearest success.
  • The abrogation of Article 370 in 2019, upheld by the Supreme Court in December 2023, is the most contested instance — a decision whose reasoning drew directly on the Constituent Assembly’s own treatment of the article as temporary.
• On democracy, the strand that has been most tested, the Emergency of 1975-77 was the closest approach to failure, and the basic structure doctrine from Kesavananda (1973), the 44th Amendment (1978) and S. R. Bommai (1994) are the corrections.
• The Preamble itself was litigated in 2024.
  • In Dr Balram Singh v. Union of India, decided on 25 November 2024, a bench of Chief Justice Sanjiv Khanna and Justice Sanjay Kumar dismissed pleas to delete socialist and secular from the Preamble.
  • The Court held that Parliament’s amending power extends to the Preamble, and that the 1949 adoption date does not restrict later amendment.
  • On content it held that in the Indian context socialism means a welfare state that does not preclude private enterprise, and secularism means equal treatment of all faiths — a feature already identified as part of the basic structure in Kesavananda and Bommai, well before 1976.
• The Assembly’s deferred questions are being answered by others. Uttarakhand became the first state to bring a Uniform Civil Code into force, in January 2025, giving Article 44 its first legislative content in seventy-five years and reopening exactly the argument Ambedkar had in 1948 about compulsion and consent.
• The Constitution has also become an electoral symbol.
  • During the 2024 general election, whether the Constitution would be altered became a central campaign theme, argued in both directions.
  • Whatever one makes of the competing claims, the episode is evidence that the document now functions as a live object of popular political attachment rather than as a lawyer’s text.

Conclusion

The perspectives on the Constitution are not five opinions about one object; each is a claim about whose document it is, and that is what generates the disagreement about what it is. The Gandhian says it belongs to the city, the Marxist to property, the Ambedkarite to whoever is willing to work it, the traditionalist to a foreign tradition, and the liberal to the citizen.

Austin’s answer — that it is a social document holding unity, democracy and social revolution in a seamless web — remains the most defensible, and the evidence is that the web has held under real strain: Emergency, insurgency, coalition government, economic transformation and eighteen general elections. Where it has frayed, it has frayed along exactly the line he identified, at the points where unity was pursued at the cost of the other two strands.

The more useful question to carry forward, though, is Ambedkar’s rather than Austin’s. He did not ask whether the Constitution was good; he asked whether the country would work it, and he named the contradiction — political equality resting on social inequality — that would decide the answer. Seventy-five years on, that remains the open question, and it is not a question about the document at all.