Constitution Day 2022 once again brought to the fore the urgency and enormity of the challenge to defend the spirit and values of the Constitution. In two reassuring signs, we saw Professor Anand Teltumbde walk free on bail after close to a thousand days in prison defeating a desperate NIA bid to get the bail order stayed by the apex court, and we also saw farmers on the march across the country determined to defend agriculture and their right to secure a fair price for all their crops. This assertion of "we, the people of India" for justice and democracy is the real constitutional spirit of modern India.
But while the people assert in defence of democracy, the Constitution is subjected to relentless assault by the government of the day and the Sangh brigade. The doctrine of separation of power and functions of the executive, legislature and judiciary, which is central to constitutional governance, and the integrity of the institutional framework of parliamentary democracy are being bulldozed by a rampaging executive out to subvert the Constitution and inflict a dissent-free single-party dispensation.
Some of the recent observations by the apex court have questioned the executive about its unbridled arbitrary acts. The government's evasive response to the ongoing Constitution bench hearing on the demonetisation case six years after the arbitrary decision was inflicted without any institutional consultation or parliamentary approval makes it clear how it is now afraid of any judicial scrutiny. The minority opinion in the split verdict on the so-called EWS quota termed the quota explicitly violative of the spirit of the Constitution.
The Constitution bench hearing on the process of appointment of Election Commissioners has revealed the government's design to subvert the Election Commission and erode its institutional independence. Even as the Supreme Court was hearing the petition, the government appointed an election commissioner in a brazenly controversial manner. The government even argued with the Supreme Court about the constitutional status of the right to vote, calling it a statutory right, to which the Constitution Bench had to respond by reminding the government that it could not expand the ineligibility parameters to debar people from voting. Whether this attempt to treat the right to vote as only statutory and not constitutional is a prelude to disenfranchisement of any section of citizens is anybody's guess.
The NIA appeal against the bail granted by the Bombay High Court to scholar and writer Anand Teltumbde is another example of the Modi government's utter contempt for human rights. The NIA and UAPA have become a convenient combination in the hands of the Modi government to implicate and imprison any dissenting voice whenever it wants. Modi's recent remark against 'pen-wielding Naxals' in a video conference with Home Ministers is a clear direction for many more arrests of dissenting citizens in the days to come. Even as courts acquit or grant bail to prisoners of conscience, the Sangh brigade and the Modi government are desperate to implicate even justice-seekers for demanding release of prisoners of conscience. Incidentally in her impromptu remarks while concluding her speech at the closing session of the Constitution Day programme organised at the Supreme Court, President Droupadi Murmu too drew attention of the judiciary to overcrowding in India's jails and prisoners, especially from socially disadvantaged backgrounds, languishing in jails for years.
The assault on the Constitution is reinforced by a systematic hollowing out of its spirit and vision. We cannot forget that the RSS not only did not play any role in the freedom movement, it did not endorse the Constitution and the tricolour national flag that emerged out of the freedom movement, openly advocating the Manusmriti as India's Constitution and the saffron flag as the national flag. Now that the BJP is in power, it would like to be seen as the champion of India's freedom movement, Constitution and the national flag, but only through a relentless distortion of the history of the freedom movement and of the spirit and vision of the Constitution. Modi has been leading this reversal of the Constitution by prioritising duties over rights. In his Constitution Day address this year he went ahead to define the next twenty-five years as Kartavya Kaal or the era of duties.
Now taking a cue from Modi's new-found rhetoric calling India the mother of democracy, the government has now launched an orchestrated campaign around a Concept Note issued by the Indian Council of Historical Research which posits the Constitution as a product of 'Hindu political theory', 'Hindu culture and civilisation in the face of 2000 years of invasions by alien cultures and ethnicities'. This brazenly negates the actual process and perspective of the emergence of the Indian Constitution on the basis of India's anti-colonial freedom movement and quest for social justice and equality by breaking free from institutionalised caste hierarchy and gender injustice. It is nothing but turning of Ambedkar's Constitution on its head. The Constitution must be saved from being reduced to a plaything for the Modi regime.
