Constitution has stood us in good stead
THIS year’s Constitution Day coincided with pleas that a mosque and a dargah be surveyed to verify whether they had temples underneath. Pleas like these remind us how far we remain as a nation from realising the dream the Constitution symbolises and represents. As a symbol, it stands for a transformative vision. No wonder it evokes criticism from people who cannot differentiate between a civilisation and a modern nation. Both the drafting and adoption of the Constitution represent a possibility — that as a society, we can accomplish complex tasks that require a difficult and long dialogue. This is what our neighbour and historical cohorts on either side could not successfully manage. Their struggle to achieve stability continues, reminding us that we should not take ourselves for granted.
The search for temples beneath mosques and shrines also points out that we must appreciate how exceptionally lucky we were to have a document that has stood us in good stead for 75 years. This is not a minor achievement, but we can’t afford to rest on our laurels.
Our difficulties arise partly because the means available to us for passing on ideas and values to younger people have not been robust or all that reliable. The Constitution is, of course, taught in considerable detail and is frequently mentioned in schools and colleges, but teaching it is not easy if you want to bring it alive. To enable young people to recognise that it is a transformative document, they must know what it tries to transform and why. This is where most debates of the present times arise. A lot of people who see India as essentially an old civilisation don’t like it being called a new nation. Between these two positions, an interesting dialogue is possible, but it doesn’t occur. Like everything else in our times, this polarity is also treated as frozen. The two sides exist in independent orbits. The possibility of a bridge does not get a chance to be explored.
Of course, the makers of the Constitution were aware of this polarity. And those who did not directly participate in the final drafting also knew that India was both an old civilisation and a new nation. One such person was Mahatma Gandhi. He drew inspiration from India’s civilisational resources in his struggle to seek freedom from colonial rule and resolve Indian society’s internal strife and contradictions in a peaceful manner. It was a monumental struggle, as one can imagine. The Independence movement was arduous and long; and it was the first movement of its kind in the colonial world. India’s Independence inspired many other colonised nations and still does, because it had no precedent. No doubt it involved several violent episodes, but the key political moves that led towards freedom created a new discourse of liberation through peaceful argumentation.
Several new ideals and values arose during the freedom movement, and the Constitution offers to the young the best repository of these ethical achievements. If a teacher uses the Preamble to study the history of the 19th and 20th centuries, the Constitution would come alive — in the sense that the deep difficulties its drafting posed would all surface. How Dr BR Ambedkar, who chaired the drafting group, ironed out various positions and assertions is an amazing story of consensus-building. Terms like ‘equality’ and ‘justice’ are not mere words conveying key values that the Constitution asserts as fundamental. A critique of society and the urgency to transform it so that it can be governed democratically is embedded in these words.
Is justice possible among grossly unequal groups? Is equality possible in the middle of destitution and exploitation? Such are the questions hidden in the Preamble. And then, there is an overarching question: Is fraternity possible when chasms are so deep and they often get flooded with volatile emotions? Makers of the Constitution were aware of the risks that the politics of representation would pose to values encoded in the ethical framework.
I once tried to impart the experience of Constitution-making to my students by presenting a family map. It featured three generations living under one roof but with different worries brewing in their hearts. The older generation had just two members left, while the middle one consisted of four members whose capacities and interests radically differed. Then there was the third generation, consisting of the children of three siblings of the middle generation. Among the children, too, there was great variation in pursuits and capacities. They had an unmarried aunt and an uncle who was financially weak and routinely needed help from the rest of the family, including the two grandparents. It was a complex task to prepare a document about the future arrangements that the grandparents wanted to be put in place with consensus before their death.
I made four discussion groups and assigned drafting to a fifth group. I returned to the room after an hour and found the place quite noisy and chaotic. One hour was left for the exercise, but there no sense of hurry among any of the groups. So, I went away and came back an hour later. I was told that more time was required, so we decided to meet again the next day. The same thing happened next day, and we needed more time. Finally, when we met to discuss the draft Constitution, I noticed as many as six notes of dissent appended to it. Everything was read out and the discussion began. There were several angry voices, and some were sulking. The drafting group was also unhappy because every discussion group was blaming them for unfair recording.
Teaching about the real Constitution became easy after this exercise. These students were in the first year of Delhi University’s legendary B.El.Ed. (Bachelor of Elementary Education) course. The collective attempt to create a document that was under so many contending demands and pressures had given the class a considerable taste of what the drafting and passage of the real Constitution of India must have been like. I didn’t need to tell them that for a newborn nation, it was quite an achievement.
