Opinion Express View on January 26: Restating the Republic

Republic Day 2024: There are times in the life of a republic when it must pause and take stock of the arguments within, and rededicate itself to being its own best version. This Republic Day, the 75th, brings this moment. Today, there are impatient and contending ideas of what the nation is, what it can be. The dominant idea, which has been drawing support electorally, is an exhortation to break from the past, to create, almost, a second republic. One that relocates itself, in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s words, in the space that joins “dev” with “desh”, “Ram” with “rashtra”. The effusively worded Union Cabinet resolution Wednesday congratulating the Prime Minister on the consecration of the Ram temple at Ayodhya echoes this idea of a new era dawning and a nation reborn — while the “body” of the country attained independence in 1947, it says, “the pran pratishtha of its soul was done on January 22, 2024”. In a country of the young that is increasingly turning its face to the world, this idea is sought to be articulated in encompassing terms, to fold in not just the past but also future technologies, not just heritage but also modernity, an updated infrastructure as well as more efficient welfare schemes. Republic Day comes as a reminder that any attempt to recast and remake the nation, howsoever tall or righteous its claims, must necessarily be tested against the touchstone of the values and ideals enshrined in the Constitution that, 75 years later, continue to animate and nourish the republic.

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India’s Constitution has endured over decades because it is capacious and accommodative, because it adapts to change and leaves space for negotiations. It is not a platform for fixities. Even the basic structure that cannot be amended, as interpreted by the apex court, is a set of features very broadly defined. In a time when winner-takes-all seeks to become the reigning dictum, and when the opposition spaces seem to shrink, a restatement of the Constitution’s basic features is in order, in letter and spirit. It means, at the very least, the primacy of the rule of law and due process, not the instant state-sponsored vigilantism of the bulldozer. It means that victory must always be leavened by humility — indeed, the PM bracketed “vijay” with “vinay” — and that both the winners and losers should recognise that the rules of the game, anchored in the Constitution, are larger than both, will outlive both.

Let this January 26, therefore, be a reminder of the continuity of the republic. And of what binds it, and keeps it honest, through the ups and downs of politics and history.