Preamble #6: "Constitutional Morality"

Even before the ink was dry on the Constitution, Ambedkar worried whether the Constitution would survive. To make it stick, to make it impossible to subvert and overthrow, he believed “constitutional morality” had to take root, writes Aakash Singh Rathore in Ambedkar’s Preamble. In his famous appeal on that topic, Ambedkar cautioned:

“Constitutional morality is not a natural sentiment. It has to be cultivated. We must realize our people have yet to learn it. Democracy in India is only a top-dressing on an Indian soil, which is essentially undemocratic.”

That last part was a shot at the caste system. The democratic principle was equality, whereas the social principle was graded inequality. The former stood for liberty, the latter for fixed occupation.

 

Constitutional morality was a call to the public officials and public servants to, as Rathore puts it, “transcend the values and principles that they had been imbued with in Indian social life, and adopt the values and principles laid out before them ever-so succinctly in the Preamble”.

 

Ambedkar felt that the Constitution itself was workable and flexible and “strong enough to hold the country together”.

“Indeed, if I may say so, if things go wrong under the new Constitution, the reason will not be that we had a bad Constitution, what we will have to say is that Man was vile.”

 

Ambedkar would later say that the reason he stayed on in the Cabinet after the framing of the Constitution was to frame and push through the Hindu Code Bill. His exact words are as articulate as they are scathing:

“The Hindu Code was the greatest social reform measure ever undertaken by the legislature in this country. No law passed by the Indian Legislature in the past or likely to be passed in the future can be compared to it in point of its significance. To leave inequality between class and class, between sex and sex, which is the soul of Hindu Society untouched… is to make a farce of our Constitution and to build a palace on a dung heap.”

 

This was Ambedkar worrying whether the constitution and ideas like democracy and equality would survive. Right from inception. And boy, was he right in worrying. Just take a look at how nations so similar to us on our west (Pakistan) and east (Bangladesh) and their experience with their constitutions…

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