Are we honouring the Constitution?

When both the politics of freedom and that of self-restraint are compromised, uncertainty wracks society, and anomie follows.

By Neera Chandhoke

The Constitution of India, which we celebrate on 26 January of every year, has granted to each citizen an elaborate set of rights to life, liberty and security under Article 21. But we continue to inhabit one of the most hierarchical and oppressive caste-bound societies the world has seen. Our own people are prevented from exercising their constitutionally mandated right to liberty. Rights are important because they allot to the bearer moral status. The possession and exercise of rights makes a political statement: there are certain things that should be done for people. There are certain things that must not be done to them. In a democratic world, rights are our only political weapon; our only political vocabulary to overturn hierarchies. Have constitutionally granted rights succeeded in changing social equations in India? Perhaps yes, perhaps no. We had enough early warnings that constitutional democracy and its language of rights may not succeed in a profoundly undemocratic society. On November 4, 1949, during the discussion of the draft constitution, B.R. Ambedkar addressed a significant issue that had been catapulted onto the agenda of the assembly – that provisions of the Constitution had been borrowed from the West. Can, he asked rhetorically, a constitution framed in the middle of the 20th century be absolutely new. Ambedkar accepted that the section on administrative provisions in the constitution had replicated the Government of India Act, 1935. Certainly, he said, such detailed administrative provisions should not form part of a Constitution. But their inclusion was necessary to protect democracy. For, as he was to say famously, democracy “in India is only a top-dressing on an Indian soil, which is essentially undemocratic”.

This phrase has been quoted often enough. The implications of the phrase are of enormous significance. Ambedkar brought great learning, immense political understanding, and perception to the deliberations of the Constituent Assembly. He also brought to the debate enormous wisdom born out of his own experiences as a Dalit. Life had taught him that it was not enough for the people to metaphorically give themselves a constitution. The constitution should become a part of their lives and those of the political elite, it should be an object of reverence, and a recipient of political passion. He called this virtue ‘constitutional morality’.

The idea of constitutional morality

Ambedkar’s inspiration for the concept of constitutional morality, that he introduced in his speech of November 4, 1949 on the draft constitution, and on November 25, 1949 in his final reply to the debate, was the 19th century British historian and Enlightenment thinker George Grote (1794-1871). Grote had authored 12 volumes on the history of Greece (1846-1856), particularly on Athenian democracy. On defending Athenian democracy against its critics from Plato onwards to his contemporaries, Grote suggested that Athens had given to the world a notion of democracy that rested on the twin planks of freedom and self-restraint. He focused on Cleisthenes, considered to be the founder of Athenian democracy, and on his belief that we must be passionately attached to the constitution.

The coexistence of freedom and self-imposed restraints, for Grote, can be found in two other historical instances. The first was the Glorious Revolution in England in 1688. In that year, the monarch James II was replaced by his daughter Mary II and her husband William III on the throne. The other instance was provided by the American Constitution. In the case of Athens, as in later historical instances, it was generally accepted that the procedures of decision-making had to be governed by the morality of the constitution, particularly if the law was silent on the specifics of certain situations. There was a deeper argument that underlay the idea of constitutional morality. This is best expressed in the words of Grote.
“It was necessary (for Cleisthenes) to create in the multitude…that rare and difficult sentiment which we may term constitutional morality – a paramount reverence for the forms of the constitution, enforcing obedience to the authorities, acting under and within these forms, yet combined with the habit of open speech, of action subject only to definite legal control and unrestrained censure of those very authorities as to all their public acts – combined too with a perfect confidence in the bosom of every citizen amidst the bitterness of a party contest, that the form of the constitution will not be less sacred in the eyes of the opponents than his own.”

Political authorities, in other words, were responsible for the incul