Opinion Indian Constitution@76: Why constitutional morality is essential for democracy

One way of answering this is to recognise the multidimensionality of the Constitution. It is at once a charter of rights and a statement of collective aspiration. Its promise rests on an optimistic belief that an egalitarian nation can be built through law, a belief that depends, in part, on a liturgical and aesthetic foundation. That imaginative dimension begins with the Preamble’s values but does not end there. The calligraphy and artworks of the original document gesture towards a deeper cultural inheritance. The images of animals, deities, freedom fighters, mountains and seas form a teleological linear narrative that anchors the Republic in a civilisation memory. Even the stylised “We the People”, with vines woven tightly around the letters, signals that the political community is inseparable from the landscape and traditions that sustain it, a metaphor for rootedness, growth and vitality.

It is less widely appreciated that the Indian Constitution did not spring fully formed from the Constituent Assembly; rather, it stands at the end of a long, pre-history of constitutional drafting. Decades before the Constituent Assembly met, competing drafts and proposals were already sketching possible futures for an independent republic. The 1895 Constitution of India Bill — of uncertain authorship but often associated with Bal Gangadhar Tilak— articulated an early vision of self-rule. The Hindu Mahasabha’s 1944 Constitution of the Hindusthan Free State went even further, proposing a direct-democratic polity with referendums, initiatives and the right to recall elected representatives. These documents, among others, reveal a robust constitutional imagination that predated the formal drafting process.

Building on this plural heritage, the Constitution itself resists any attempt to fix it to a single ideological frame. It holds liberal ideals of dignity and liberty, a commitment to redistribution for the common good, and a communitarian vision of collective progress. It is not a monolith with tunnel vision but a plural, dynamic text that often thrives on its own internal tensions. Article 21’s expansive protection of life sits alongside Article 22’s preventive-detention powers; the latter does not cancel the former, but reflects a willingness to hold competing imperatives in uneasy balance. The interplay between the individual and the common good is what keeps the Constitution alive. Time and again, the Supreme Court has affirmed it as a living Constitution, a dynamic framework through which each generation renegotiates the terms of its shared life. The federal structure, with its three lists and residuary powers, has an unmistakable centripetal pull, yet it was never meant to be a model of absolute central authority or unrestrained regional autonomy. It is deliberately built on friction and dialogue, a system that channels and demands justification for the exercise of power.

This founding ambivalence sets the stage for the constant negotiation between constituent and constituted power, between what is politically created and what is legally stabilised. Jacques Derrida reminds us that this undecidability is not an accident. Every constitution must speak in a language that is at once recognitory and declaratory, claiming to represent a pre-existing people, and at the same time emancipatory, creating that very political community through the act of proclamation.

The operation of any constitution depends as much on social practices as on its text. Its character and effect cannot be fully determined by its drafters or by majorities exercising law-making powers alone — a point B R Ambedkar underscored in his call for a vigilant cultivation of constitutional morality and culture. Ambedkar recognised a risk that lay beyond the text. A constitution could be carefully drafted and still falter if its spirit failed to take hold. He conceded that the document carried large doses of administrative detail, yet believed this was inevitable in a country that had law but not a settled culture of constitutionalism. To explain the gap, he turned to George Grote’s idea of “constitutional morality” — the discipline that makes the exercise of power both legitimate and peaceable. Ambedkar had studied Grote at Columbia and drew on him to advance a clear proposition: Power must learn to justify itself. In his view, that habit had not yet been formed in India. Democracy, he noted, was “a top-dressing on an Indian soil, which is essentially undemocratic”. The Constitution was therefore intended as a training in civic restraint.

Where does that expectation hold, and where does it recede? The recent Supreme Court ruling on grounds of arrests clarified that reasons must be supplied in writing. That such a safeguard required restatement seven decades into the Republic signals a deeper distance between constitutional norm and administrative routine.

Article 32 gives citizens direct access to the Supreme Court, but state power rarely begins in courtrooms. It begins in files, forms and verbal instructions — the everyday choices where the Constitution must guide actions. This demands more than rhetoric: Clear guidelines, administrative training, and embedding constitutional reasoning in our governance hierarchies. A Constitution comes of age when participation and constitutional literacy make democracy habitual.

Zala is an advocate, studying LLM at University of Cambridge. Narayanan is a Delhi-based advocate