Elaborate the concept of constitutional morality as given by B.R. Ambedkar. (2018)
Constitutional morality appears nowhere in the text of the Constitution. It is B. R. Ambedkar’s, set out in the Constituent Assembly on 4 November 1948 while introducing the Draft Constitution, and borrowed from the historian George Grote’s A History of Greece. Its claim is sociological, not legal: a constitution is machinery, and machinery works only if the society running it has internalised the disposition the document presupposes.
What Ambedkar took from Grote
Grote’s definition, which Ambedkar read into the record, holds together obedience and dissent: paramount reverence for the forms of the constitution and obedience to authorities acting within them, combined with the habit of open speech and unrestrained censure of those same authorities, and confidence that one’s opponents hold the forms equally sacred. It is not loyalty to a government or agreement on ends, but shared allegiance to a method of contesting ends.
Why Ambedkar thought India lacked it
- His defence of the draft’s administrative detail was that form without disposition is empty: the Constitution supplies only the organs of state, and conduct fills them.
- His warning is the core: constitutional morality is not a natural sentiment; it has to be cultivated. Democracy in India is only a top-dressing on an Indian soil which is essentially undemocratic. The claim is diagnostic: a constitution premised on equality would sit atop a hierarchical social morality.
- The diagnosis comes from Annihilation of Caste (1936): caste is not a division of labour but a division of labourers, a graded inequality of ascending reverence and descending contempt in which fraternity and social endosmosis are impossible.
- States and Minorities (1947) supplies the other half: he wanted state socialism written into the text because political democracy could not survive on an unequal economic base — the argument restated on 25 November 1949, that from 26 January 1950 India enters a life of contradictions, one person one vote against social and economic inequality.
Sociological force of the idea
Read sociologically, it demands that mores be reconstructed to match enacted law — the inverse of William Graham Sumner’s claim that stateways cannot change folkways. It restates Max Weber’s point that rational-legal authority holds only where belief in the legality of enacted rules is genuine; Ambedkar’s cultivation is what Émile Durkheim would call the making of a new collective conscience.
Judicial afterlife and the critique
Indian courts revived the phrase in Naz Foundation (Delhi High Court, 2009), Puttaswamy (2017), Navtej Singh Johar (2018), Joseph Shine (2018) and the Sabarimala ruling, Indian Young Lawyers Association v. State of Kerala (2018), each subordinating popular or religious morality to it. The critique is drift. Pratap Bhanu Mehta stresses that the idea concerns procedural form, not substantive outcomes, so using it to settle contested social questions overloads it; Attorney General K. K. Venugopal called it in December 2018 a very dangerous weapon that could make the Court a third chamber. Ambedkar addressed citizens and legislators; the courts have made it a judicial trump card.
Conclusion
Constitutional morality is Ambedkar’s answer to how a modern legal order survives in a hierarchical society: not by enforcement but by cultivation. That it must still be invoked against prevailing social morality is itself proof of his warning that the top-dressing has not yet taken root.