A Citizen’s Lament: 75 Years of the Indian Republic

We have always hailed you for the monumental task of drafting our founding document. However, as a citizen observing our journey 75 years later, I am left with a profound lament: It seems you never truly trusted the people of India or their potential.

Despite the Preamble’s declaration that “We, the People” gave ourselves this Constitution, the right to vote remains a mere statutory right, not a fundamental one. In a tragic inversion of democracy, the government effectively retains the power to decide who can vote for them, rather than the people exerting ultimate sovereignty over the government.

True federalism was the only path for this “melting pot of civilizations” to flourish. You feared balkanization, yet those who sought a religion-based state had already departed. They left behind a people who, like the Muslim-majority Kashmir under Sheikh Abdullah, consciously chose India. Why, then, did we choose a unitary-biased state over a truly federal one?

A real federation would have allowed our diverse cultures to excel within their own borders, while the Centre focused solely on the essentials: a strong military, a stable currency, and strategic foreign relations.

Even the trauma of Partition which was already subsided by 1948 was largely a breakdown of police and administration that turned into mob violence and criminal takeover was used to justify a strong unitary bias, weak due process in Article 21, easily suspendable rights, and a Constitution that distrusts even democratically elected state legislatures elected by same voters.
Though later in 1987, South Korea did not respond to this existential threat from the North by building a permanently strong, unitary, caution-heavy constitution that puts the state above the people.

We imported Weimar’s dangerous emergency logic contained in their Article 48 into Articles 358 and 359 after its misuse by Hitler was well known, making fundamental rights unenforceable at the stroke of a pen.

Furthermore, our Constitution failed to grant an absolute Freedom of Expression subject only to “due process of law.”

A civilization that produced the Gita containing deep philosophical inquiry, doubt, questioning, and dialogue and multiple paths to salvation, the Upanishads, the Charvaka school (open atheism/ materialism), Buddhist and Jain traditions of debate, and the Nyaya school of logic Sufi tradition, in principle, have had no insecurity about freedom of expression., we are strangely hesitant to trust the individual voice.

Today, our brightest minds must leave our shores to write seminal papers like “Attention Is All You Need” or to lead the AI revolution, because our own ecosystem stifles the very dissent and innovation that freedom of speech provides.

The tragedy of your “soul of the Constitution”—Article 32—is most visible in the tehsils. To a Dalit woman in Uttar Pradesh or a Tribal person in Chhattisgarh, the right to move the Supreme Court is a “North Star”: beautiful to look at, but impossibly distant. Justice is not justice if it is not reachable within a reasonable time and distance at
affordable to every citizen.

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It is a stinging reality that despite the “Greatest Democracy” has never cracked the top 50 in the V-Dem rankings, let alone joined the “Elite 30” like Japan and Germany—nations whose modern constitutions were adopted just two years before our own. Instead, we sit at 105th in Democracy and 103rd in Fundamental Rights.

That is my only lament: That we were given a document of management and caution, when we deserved a document of trust and liberation. We could never become thriving democracy which alone could have brought prosperity to nation.