AT A LITERATURE FESTIVAL last week, the anchor posed a crucial question to former CJI D.Y. Chandrachud – that the Indian Constitution had, lately, become central to political demonstration. For opposition parties and civil society, it had emerged as a symbol of resistance, and as an inviolable basic architecture of Indian governance that had faced abuse by the executive under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. For the ruling regime, it was the symbol of democratic survival despite Indira Gandhi’s national emergency. “The Constitution is not just print on a parchment,” Justice Chandrachud noted, “the Constitution is a dialogue between citizens.”
Legal academic Martin Loughlin explains that constitutions have a “world-making capacity”, actively shaping political reality, not just being influenced from them. However, they are, he argues, ‘agnostic documents’ – sites of contestation – which are only interpreted through a ‘dialectic of ideology and utopia’. In other words, what the Constitution’s status within the larger national scenario becomes is very much hooked to how it is publicly debated and imagined by thinkers of differing ideologies, and their differing aspirations from the document.
