Opinion On Republic Day, a reminder: Politics, government and society can erode the Constitution – or protect it
Civil society shows us how laws function in practice. Academic and public debate elucidate norms before they can be litigated. Combined, these spaces make up the ecosystem that decides whether constitutional promises live on
We talk of the Constitution as if it lives mostly in courts — in judgments, benches, and reported law. Courts are important, and judicial review is one of the Constitution’s most essential safeguards. This Republic Day comes at a time when constitutional questions are no longer just a matter of law reports and courts. Rather, they recur in quieter, more bureaucratic forms: Electoral rolls being redrafted with surgical precision, administrative preventive detention orders that outlast public attention, state policies to redraw the lines of equality not by great declaratory gestures on behalf of the general populace but by state governance at work (in more mundane forms).
These events are almost never made as spectacular constitutional collapses. They come in bits and pieces — via executive notifications, administrative freer will and political strategising. And often, they do so long before a writ petition is filed.
We persist in talking of the Constitution as if it lives mostly in courts — in judgments, benches, and reported law. Courts are important — and judicial review is one of the Constitution’s most essential safeguards. But the notion that constitutional meaning is created or defended only in courtrooms misunderstands the design of the Constitution as well as the relationship between power and the states in a modern republic. The Indian Constitution was never intended to be upheld on the bench alone. It was intended to be lived, contended with, and defended across institutions and within public life.
The Constituent Assembly was not a judicial body. It was a political one — divisive, argumentative, hyper-aware of power. Federalism, minority protection, secularism, and social justice were not abstract principles, but hard-won compromises of lived experience and historical anxiety. The framers didn’t foresee that constitutional responsibility would terminate in adoption; they assumed this vigilance would be permanent.
B R Ambedkar sounded a reminder that “constitutional morality” was not instinctive. That culture needed to be cultivated in institutions, in political actors and in citizens themselves. Courts, he knew, couldn’t form that culture on the spot. Anyone who has ever practised constitutional law gets this quickly. A judgment may proclaim rights, but effectiveness relies on executive compliance, legislative restraint, and political legitimacy. Preventive detention laws, for example, are constitutionally permissible and democratically dangerous. But their growth or normalisation does not depend on judicial interpretation alone but rather on political decision making and public consent.
When activists such as Umar Khalid stand imprisoned for years without trial, or when voices such as Sonam Wangchuk are detained while articulating constitutional mandates of representation and autonomy, the question is not just legal. It is constitutional even more fundamentally — on how dissent is afforded an interest, how freedom is protected and how power responds to challenge. Also, when the state governments have been mulling over or enacting measures to limit the transfer of land on religious grounds, as in Assam, that question would not end purely at the level of legislative competence. It touches on equality, secularism, and freedom of residence, the ideals that are tested not just in courtrooms, but in daily governance.
Courts intervene episodically. Governance operates continuously. If constitutional values are decimated, however, institutionally — by micro-planning, selective enforcement or bureaucratic opacity — judicial review is a belated and broken remedy. By the time courts are contacted, damage has been diffuse, normalised and politicised.
Opposition is a constitutional function because it questions the power of the executive. Public legitimacy is sustained through media scrutiny. Civil society shows us how laws function in practice rather than on paper. Academic and public debate elucidate norms before they can be litigated. Combined, these spaces make up the ecosystem that decides whether constitutional promises live on. Thus the need for constitutional engagement to be “apolitical” is fundamentally misleading.
The Constitution is a political document and a legislative document itself — a document that constructs power, constrains majorities and protects minorities. To insist on neutrality in the face of power is not a constitutional fidelity; it is abdication. This is not unique to India. Constitutional democracies around the globe are facing the same tensions. The hollowing out of institutional checks in Venezuela is a sign of what happens when constitutional form survives, not constitutional culture. In Iran, demonstrations against authoritarian rule in popular protest illustrate that constitutional authority cannot be maintained by force alone. These examples matter not because India mirrors them, but because they remind us that constitutional erosion rarely announces itself.
Republic Day, then, ought to be more than just a ritualised celebration of the Constitution as a statute. A republic is shaped every day — by the legislature, the media, government offices, courtrooms and public debate— long before a matter is called out in court.
The writer is an advocate at the Supreme Court
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