10.0 Why a Philosophy? Why Now?

For nine chapters this textbook has walked you through the working machinery of the Indian state — rights, the legislature, the executive, the judiciary, federalism, local government, elections, the executive power. You have repeatedly been sent back to the Constituent Assembly Debates^? to understand why a particular provision is worded the way it is. This final chapter asks the deepest question of all: why did the founders feel the need to bind themselves and all future generations to a Constitution at all? What kind of Constitution did India give itself? Do its objectives have moral content — and if so, what is it?

The answer is that every Constitution worth its name carries within it a political philosophy^? — a vision of the good society. To understand the Indian Constitution only as a legal document is to read its words but miss its soul. To understand its philosophy is to grasp why a young, poor, just-decolonised, deeply unequal society chose to bet its future on universal franchise, fundamental rights, secularism and federalism — values that older, richer democracies took centuries, and several wars, to accept.

10.1 What Is Meant by the Philosophy of the Constitution?

Some people insist that a constitution consists only of laws — and that laws are one thing, while values and morality are quite another. On this view we can adopt only a legalistic approach to the Constitution, never a political-philosophical one. But this is not quite right. It is true that not every law has a moral content. But many laws are tightly tied to values we hold deeply. A law forbidding discrimination on grounds of language or religion exists because we value equality. A law banning forced labour exists because we value liberty and dignity. There is, plainly, a connection between laws and moral values.

So we must look upon the Constitution as a document based on a certain moral vision. We need a political philosophy approach^? to it. A political philosophy approach has three things in mind:

When the framers chose to guide Indian society and polity by a particular set of values, there must have been a corresponding set of reasons. Many of those reasons may not have been spelled out in the Constitution's text, but they shine through the debates. A philosophical treatment of any value is incomplete if a detailed justification for it is not provided.

A political-philosophy approach is needed for three jobs: to bring out the moral content expressed in the Constitution; to evaluate its claims; and to arbitrate between varying interpretations of its core values. Many ideals of the Constitution are contested in legislatures, party forums, the press, schools and universities. They are interpreted differently — sometimes wilfully manipulated for partisan short-term interests. Since the Constitution itself carries enormous authority, it can be used as the arbiter when interpretations clash.

10.2 The Constitution as a Means of Democratic Transformation

It is widely agreed that one reason for having a Constitution is the need to restrict the exercise of power. Modern states are excessively powerful; they hold a monopoly over legal force and coercion. What if the institutions of such a state fall into the wrong hands? Even institutions created for our safety can turn against us. So we draw the rules of the political game in such a way that the state's tendency to harm its own citizens is continuously checked. Constitutions provide these basic rules, and so prevent states from turning tyrannical.

But this is only half the story. Constitutions also provide peaceful, democratic means to bring about social transformation. For a hitherto colonised people, a Constitution announces and embodies the first real exercise of political self-determination. Jawaharlal Nehru^? understood both these points well. The demand for a Constituent Assembly, he claimed, represented a collective demand for full self-determination — only a Constituent Assembly of elected Indian representatives had the right to frame India's Constitution without external interference. And the Constituent Assembly was, in his words, not merely a body of able lawyers but “a nation on the move”, fashioning for itself a new garment of its own making.

This had a quietly revolutionary implication for the very theory of constitutional democracy. Constitutions, on this approach, exist not only to limit those in power; they exist also to empower those who have traditionally been deprived of power. They give vulnerable people — Dalits, Adivasis, women, the poor, religious minorities — a tool to achieve a collective good. The Indian Constitution is, simultaneously, a document of limitation and a document of transformation.

Why go back to the Constituent Assembly?

Why “look backwards” and bind ourselves to the past? In America, where the Constitution was written in the late eighteenth century, applying eighteenth-century values to the twenty-first century would be absurd. In India the situation is different. The world of the original framers and our present-day world have not yet drifted that far apart in terms of values, ideals and conceptions. Therefore, in India, “a history of our Constitution is still very much a history of the present”. We may have forgotten the real point underlying many of our legal and political practices simply because, somewhere down the road, we began to take them for granted. When the going is good, this forgetting is harmless. But when these practices are challenged, neglect of their underlying principles becomes harmful. To grasp the value of current constitutional practice we may have no option but to revisit the Assembly debates — and sometimes go even further back to the colonial era.

10.3 The Political Philosophy of Our Constitution — Seven Core Features

It is hard to describe this philosophy in one word. The Indian Constitution resists any single label because it is, all at once, liberal, democratic, egalitarian, secular, and federal; it is open to community values, sensitive to the needs of religious and linguistic minorities and of historically disadvantaged groups; and it is committed to a common national identity. In short, it is committed to freedom, equality, social justice and a form of national unity — with a clear emphasis on peaceful and democratic means of putting that philosophy into practice.

10.3.1 Individual freedom

The first thing to note is the Constitution's commitment to individual freedom. This commitment did not appear miraculously in calm deliberations around a table. It was the product of more than a century of intellectual and political activity. As early as the start of the nineteenth century, Rammohan Roy protested against the British colonial state's curtailment of the freedom of the press, arguing that a state responsive to citizens must give them the means to communicate their needs. So a free press became a continuous Indian demand under colonial rule.

It is therefore unsurprising that freedom of expression is integral to the Indian Constitution — as is freedom from arbitrary arrest (the infamous Rowlatt Act of 1919, which the national movement opposed so vehemently, sought to deny precisely this freedom). Add to these freedom of conscience and other personal liberties, and we can say the Constitution carries a strong liberal character^?. For more than forty years before the Constitution was adopted, every single resolution, scheme, bill and report of the Indian National Congress treated individual rights not as a passing remark but as a non-negotiable value.

10.3.2 Social justice

To call the Indian Constitution liberal is not to call it liberal only in the classical western sense. Classical liberalism always privileges the rights of individuals over demands of social justice and community values. The liberalism of the Indian Constitution differs from this version in two ways. First, it was always tied to social justice. The clearest example is the constitutional provision for reservations for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. The makers of the Constitution believed that simply granting equality on paper was not enough to overcome age-old injustices suffered by these groups, nor to give real meaning to their right to vote. Special constitutional measures — reservation of seats in legislatures and the option to reserve public-sector jobs — were required to advance their interests.

10.3.3 Respect for diversity and minority rights

The Indian Constitution encourages equal respect between communities. This was not easy in our country, for two reasons. First, communities do not always relate to each other as equals; they often stand in hierarchical relationships (as in caste). Second, when they do see each other as equals, they often become rivals (as in religious communities). The challenge for the framers: how do we make communities liberal in their approach and foster equal respect among them under conditions of either hierarchy or intense rivalry?

The easy way out would have been to refuse to recognise communities at all — the path of most western liberal constitutions. But this would have been unworkable in India. Indians are not more attached to communities than people elsewhere; the French and the Germans also belong to deeply held linguistic communities. What makes India different is that we have more openly acknowledged the value of communities, and that India is a land of multiple cultural communities — multiple linguistic and religious groups, not just one or two. To ensure that no one community systematically dominates others, the Constitution recognises community-based rights, including the right of religious communities to establish and run their own educational institutions, which may receive government aid. The Constitution does not see religion merely as a ‘private’ matter.

10.3.4 Secularism — principled distance, not mutual exclusion

Secular states are widely seen as treating religion as a private matter, refusing to give it any public or official recognition. Does this mean the Indian Constitution is not secular? It does not. Although the term ‘secular’ was not initially in the Preamble, the Indian Constitution has always been secular — in a distinctive way.

The Indian Constitution departs from the western model in two ways, for two reasons:

(a) Rights of religious groups. The framers recognised that inter-community equality is as necessary as equality between individuals. A person's freedom and self-respect depend directly on the status of her community. If one community is dominated by another, its members are also significantly less free. So the Constitution grants rights to all religious communities — including the right to establish and maintain their own educational institutions. Freedom of religion in India means the freedom of religion of both individuals and communities.

(b) State's power of intervention. Separation in India could not mean mutual exclusion. Religiously sanctioned customs such as untouchability stripped individuals of basic dignity and self-respect. Such customs were so deeply rooted that without active state intervention, there was no hope of their dissolution. So the Indian state had to be free to interfere in the affairs of religion when human dignity demanded it. Such intervention is not always negative — the state may also help religious communities by aiding their educational institutions. The state may help or hinder religious communities depending on which mode of action promotes freedom and equality. This is what we call principled distance^? — a complex idea that allows the state to be distant from all religions, intervening or abstaining as required by the values of liberty, equality and social justice.

10.3.5 Universal franchise

It is no small achievement that, at the moment of independence, India committed itself to universal adult franchise — one person, one vote, one value — even when there was widespread belief that India's traditional hierarchies were too congealed to be eliminated, and even when the right to vote had only recently been extended to women and to working-class men in stable Western democracies. Universal adult franchise^? was thus a leap of faith.

Once the idea of an Indian nation took root, the idea of democratic self-government followed. Indian nationalism always conceived of a political order based on the will of every single member of society. As early as the Constitution of India Bill (1895) — the first non-official Indian attempt at drafting a constitution — the author declared that every citizen, that is, anyone born in India, had a right to take part in the affairs of the country and be admitted to public office. The Motilal Nehru Report (1928) reaffirmed this conception of citizenship, stating that every person of either sex who has attained the age of twenty-one is entitled to vote.

10.3.6 Federalism — asymmetric, not symmetric

By including Article 371 on the North-East, the Indian Constitution anticipated the very modern concept of asymmetric federalism^?. We have seen in Chapter 7 that the Constitution creates a strong central government — a clear unitary bias. Yet it also embeds important constitutional differences between the legal status and prerogatives of different sub-units within the same federation. Unlike the constitutional symmetry of American federalism, Indian federalism is constitutionally asymmetric. To meet the specific needs and requirements of certain sub-units, it was always part of the original design to give them special status. Under Article 371A, the North-Eastern State of Nagaland received a special status that not only protects pre-existing local laws but also restricts immigration to protect local identity. Many other States enjoy similar special provisions.

Although the Constitution did not originally envisage it, India is now a multi-lingual federation. Each major linguistic group is politically recognised and all are treated as equals. The democratic and linguistic federalism of India has managed to combine claims to unity with claims to cultural recognition. A robust political arena exists where multiple identities complement, rather than threaten, each other.

10.3.7 National identity

The Constitution constantly reinforces a common national identity. As Chapter 7 showed, India retains regional identities alongside the national one. Common identity is not incompatible with distinct religious or linguistic identities. The Constitution tried to balance these various identities — but, under certain conditions, it gave preference to the common one. The clearest example is the rejection of separate electorates based on religious identity. Separate electorates were rejected not because the framers feared difference between religious communities as such, nor because they endangered a simple notion of national unity, but because they endangered a healthy national life. Rather than imposing forced unity, the Constitution sought to evolve true fraternity — a goal especially dear to Dr. B. R. Ambedkar. As Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel put it, the main objective was to evolve “one community”.

10.4 The Preamble — A Moral Identity Card

Many readers say that the best summary of the philosophy of the Constitution is to be found in the Preamble^?. Apart from the substantive objectives it lists, the Preamble makes a quietly humble claim: the Constitution is not ‘given’ by a body of great men — it is prepared and adopted by ‘We, the people of India...’. The people are themselves the makers of their own destinies; democracy is the instrument they use to shape their present and future.

Reading the Preamble word by word

Each word of the Preamble carries philosophical weight. Together they describe both what kind of state India is and what values it commits to.

10.5 The Substantive Achievements — Five Pillars

So far we have discussed seven core features. Five of these can also be described as the substantive achievements of the Constitution — the things actually delivered to Indian society:

1. Liberal individualism reinvented — in a society where community values often crush individual autonomy, the Constitution carved out and protected the individual.
2. Social justice without sacrificing liberty — affirmative action for SCs and STs was constitutionally entrenched in 1950, almost two decades before America's Civil Rights Act of 1964.
3. Group rights for cultural particularity — against the backdrop of inter-communal strife, the Constitution upheld minority rights, anticipating multiculturalism by four decades.
4. Universal adult franchise — one of the boldest commitments in the world, made by a poor, just-decolonised, deeply hierarchical society.
5. Asymmetric federalism — recognised regional and linguistic difference as legitimate, balancing unity with the play of multiple identities.

10.6 Wrap-Up — Why Part 2 Matters

You have now seen what the Indian Constitution stands for — the seven core features and the moral identity card we call the Preamble. Part 2 turns to the other side of the same coin. The Constitution also has procedural achievements (deliberation, accommodation, inclusion) and faces serious criticisms and limitations — that it is unwieldy, unrepresentative on questions of gender, biased toward the centre, unclear on national language, possibly unstable in its parliamentary design, and accused of being “borrowed”. We will weigh those criticisms honestly and ask: does the Constitution emerge as a living document, capable of carrying our democracy into the future?