Opinion On Republic Day, let’s celebrate a living project renewed by we the people
It is worth reflecting on constitutional authority as a collective and ongoing project of public engagement, rather than as an initiative solely of the state and merely witnessed by the people as imperial technologies of governance once sought to produce.
Republic Day, besides commemorating a moment of state founding, is also an invitation to see the republic as a living, collective project continually renewed through public participation. (ANI) The Constitution of India came into force 76 years ago. For leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru, the adoption of a republican form of government was the natural culmination of the anti-colonial struggle. The Preamble’s opening words, “We the People of India,” underline this ethos. As Nehru declared, while introducing the Objectives Resolution in the Constituent Assembly on December 13, 1946, “A free India can be nothing but a republic.” Republic Day thus marks the deliberate choice of the Constituent Assembly to reject monarchical and colonial authority and affirm the principle of popular sovereignty as the foundation of the Indian state.
The day is, therefore, an occasion for reflection. Celebrating this founding moment has long been an important part of the country’s nationalist project. The inaugural Republic Day celebrations on January 26, 1950, took place at the Irwin Amphitheatre (now the Major Dhyan Chand National Stadium) in New Delhi. In 1955, the venue was moved to Rajpath (now Kartavya Path) in New Delhi. As scholars such as Srirupa Roy observe, these ceremonies were complemented by gestures such as issuing commemorative postage stamps, declaring a paid public holiday, and granting amnesties to prisoners. The celebrations, now spectacular , translated Nehru’s ideas about synthesising modernity and tradition and combining imperial conventions with popular nationalist forms of expression: Ceremonial grandeur, military display, allegiance to the sovereign, morning processions (prabhat pheris), patriotic songs, and flag hoisting.
From 1952, military displays were followed by cultural pageantry — tableaus representing distinctive cultural practices such as festivals, dances, and weddings, a visual assertion of “unity in diversity,” of the new nation. Over time, these rituals consolidated a particular imagery of national belonging, where the state appears not only as the organiser of the celebrations but also as the principal protagonist of the republic’s founding memory. The state’s centrality invites reflection about the nature of public participation in India’s constitutional trajectory.
As historian Salmoli Choudhuri’s works show, the “public” was posited as outside the fold of the unrepresentative and inaccessible colonial state in the imagination of the nationalist and anti-caste leaders. In their different ways, leaders like Mahatma Gandhi, B R Ambedkar and Rabindranath Tagore imagined the public as a space where strangers could live together. For Gandhi, it was through friendship between people belonging to different religions; for Ambedkar, through a fidelity to law as an emancipatory framework; and for Tagore, through law supplemented by ethical culture and literature.
Thus, the public was a “differentiated unity,” grounded in friendship, law, and literary and ethical practice rather than kinship, caste, or religious fraternity. Reconstituting the public after the colonial intervention was central to the deliberations of India’s Constituent Assembly, as the works of Madhav Khosla and one of us (Bajpai) show. Where, then, do the commemorative practices of India’s republican founding sit alongside the freedom movement’s anti-colonial and anti-caste imaginings? How does the commemoration square up with the forms of collective life that the leaders of the freedom struggle sought to cultivate?
State celebrations are not devoid of popular meaning. The shared act of watching the celebrations — whether from the stands at Rajpath or through the broadcast in one’s home — carries deep emotional resonance. Yet, it is worth recalling that the Indian public was not merely a passive audience to constitutional founding. It was, instead, an active participant in its making. In recent years, scholarship on the making of the Indian constitution, such as that of Achyut Chetan, has moved beyond a focus on the Constitution’s “founding fathers”. Emerging scholarship, such as that of historians Rohit De and Ornit Shani, has contested the conventional view of Constitution-making as an elite top-down process. These scholars have shown that India’s constitutional founding involved vigorous and often critical engagement between the constitution makers and representatives of various groups and communities.
Between 1946 and 1949, as the Constituent Assembly deliberated on the drafting of the Constitution, it received thousands of letters, telegrams and petitions from a remarkably diverse set of publics — representatives of political organisations, religious groups, merchants, teachers and lawyers, even people writing in their individual capacity. Some sought representation in the various committees of the Constituent Assembly; others demanded protections and safeguards for their communities; still others offered a wide range of suggestions and amendments to the document presented by the Drafting Committee to the Constituent Assembly on February 21, 1948. The public was an active constituent in the making of this moment — it was not a passive spectator.
The constitutional process is thus an ongoing project of public engagement, rather than an state initiative merely witnessed by the people. The participation of diverse publics, whose engagements — supportive and critical — have been integral to India’s constitutional life. Republic Day, besides commemorating a moment of state founding, is also an invitation to see the republic as a living, collective project continually renewed through public participation.
Bajpai is Professor of Politics, SOAS University of London and Raturi is Associate Professor, O P Jindal Global University. The two collaborate on the PACT Project (www.pactproject.net)
Share
