Save our Constitution
Constitution is a tool that built a civic culture in Independent India. The book is a guide to understand the document that continues to act as India’s powerful glue and influences the behaviour of its citizens. The founders gave Indians a grammar of democracy through the Constitution.
Constitution is the catalyst in the democratisation of India. It infuses values, rights and a sense of duty in its citizens – things colonial rulers said couldn’t be done. People of India not only cultivated constitutional morality, but have been willing to make sacrifices for the values cherished in the Constitution.
Indians have proved Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel wrong because despotism is not acceptable to us, and Nehru would have been happy to see that we no longer have what Hegel termed as ‘slave mentality’.
The CAA protesters are testimony of the ‘civic culture’ that was born with the Constitution. The citizens’ clarion call is clear — choices made at the founding moment of the republic cannot be altered now. The citizens are now masters of their own destiny and refusing to be governed by a law they consider contrary to their sense of justice and to the foundational principles of the Constitution. They are going much beyond the Supreme Court’s highly technical, narrower and legal techniques of examining the constitutionality of parliamentary laws.
