India's Constitution is under attack and all is not well

As India celebrated its 69th Republic Day on January 26, 2018, it is strange that many people don’t understand the significance of the day and often tend to use the words democracy and republic interchangeably.

In simple words, a democracy ensures that the will of the people remains supreme, while a republic is a representative democracy that safeguards minority rights and predicates the centrality of a Constitution that guarantees some inalienable rights. Though we ritualistically celebrate the day of the adoption of the Constitution every year, do we ever wonder about the state of our republic? With acts threatening the essence of our Constitution becoming a routine affair, how long can we pretend everything is fine?

The latest bout of violence sweeping across northern and western India has to do with the film, Padmaavat, but it essentially follows a pattern of state abdication in the face of bullying and threats. Today, in India, any organised group of people can hold the state to ransom, aided and abetted by unscrupulous politicians and the state machinery. The rule of the law has become the casualty in the process and lawlessness the norm leading people to exercise self-censorship.

The protests over Padmaavat took a turn for the worse when primary schoolchildren came under attack from Karni Sena members out to save the honour of a fictional queen. While another line has been crossed, this cowardly act has made it difficult for the usual suspects to patronise these gangs anymore. But that hasn’t prevented prominent politicians, Union ministers among them, from propounding the cause-and-effect theory.

Even if we accept that the career politicians of today are not in the league of those visionaries who framed the Constitution, the least they can do is to uphold it. The oath taken by these politicians while swearing in actually commit them to this responsibility. But instead, we have, of late, been hearing cabinet ministers resolving to tinker with it to suit their interpretation of the Hindu Rashtra. Though practically every member of the central cabinet hails from that school of thought, they cease to be RSS pracharaks once they take oath under the nation’s Constitution. Discourse that once existed in shakhas and under banyan trees has been repeated with alarming alacrity by people wielding executive power. You now have a minister of human resources development challenging Darwin’s Theory of Evolution; then we wonder what is going wrong with our education.

When four of the senior-most judges in the country chose to convene an unprecedented press conference, after possibly exhausting every other alternative, one could sense that something was going terribly wrong. Even though the media played up Justice Loya’s case as the possible trigger, issues like “bench fixing” and suspicions of higher judiciary coming under the influence of the Executive have gained currency. While some people chose to criticise the judges for “rebelling” and bringing disrepute to the institution as they saw it, it was a testament that challenges faced by the Constitution are far graver and happening at a far greater pace, away from media glare. It may not be far-fetched to imagine that even the Keshavananda Bharati judgment, which outlined the basic structure Constitution, may come under threat someday.

Dr BR Ambedkar was prophetic enough to remark that a good Constitution may not be enough if the people manning were of questionable integrity. To quote Babasaheb, “I feel, however good a Constitution may be, it is sure to turn out bad because those who are called to work it happens to be a bad lot. The working of a Constitution does not depend wholly on the nature of the Constitution”.

Abdication of responsibility by large sections of the fourth pillar of democracy, and worse, transforming themselves into cheerleaders for the establishment is another cruel joke being played on the nation. Rather than speaking truth to the power, they excel in holding the opposition to account. With Whatsapp and fake news forwards presenting another set of challenges, we might soon get used to the dystopian reality of our times.

Prominent opposition parties held a “Save the Constitution” march on January 26 in the heart of Mumbai, but these marches would count for nothing, if they cannot unite against their common enemy. In fact, the schism in the Communist Party of India (Marxist) over any electoral understanding with Congress to dislodge the BJP has only intensified last week. While the current dispensation does enjoy a clear majority of their own, it may not yet translate to Constitutional amendment, but could that change in 2019 with a more decisive two-thirds majority in the face of a squabbling opposition?

Constitutional values are being chipped away at an alarming rate on a daily basis and all we can do is to watch a growing mob culture from the sidelines. At the silver jubilee celebrations of the Akhil Bharatiya Adhivakta (advocates) Parishad last September, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat pitched for reforms in the Indian Constitution based on dharma and “ethos of society” and called for a debate. What Mohan Bhagwat meant is to usher in the rule of the Hindu majority while still technically remaining a democracy. That is what the Constitutional republic guards against. But have we been vigilant enough to prevent the wave of majoritarianism seeping into our daily discourse from taking a life of its own?

Also Read: Kasganj violence: Beware of communal polarisation