Balanced institutional design

History shows that constitutions are rarely subverted by ordinary people acting together; they are far more often subverted by small, organised groups seeking to enlarge their own power at everyone else's expense. A well-crafted constitution anticipates this risk and deliberately fragments power across society so that no single group can easily seize control of the whole system. One key technique for doing this is to make sure no single institution enjoys a monopoly of power — the Indian Constitution, for instance, horizontally fragments power across the Legislature, the Executive and the Judiciary, and further distributes authority to independent statutory bodies such as the Election Commission, so that even if one institution ever tried to subvert the Constitution, other institutions would be positioned to check that attempt. This intelligent system of checks and balances is one of the reasons the Indian Constitution has succeeded where many others have not.

A second, closely related aspect of intelligent institutional design is striking the right balance between treating certain values, norms and procedures as fixed and authoritative, and allowing enough flexibility in how the constitution operates for it to adapt to genuinely changing circumstances. A constitution that is too rigid is liable to break under the pressure of change; one that is too flexible offers people no real security, predictability, or stable identity at all. Successful constitutions manage to strike this balance, which is exactly why the Indian Constitution is described, in a later chapter of this book, as a genuinely "living" document — able to change through amendment while still preserving its core commitments, which is a large part of why it has survived and remained relevant for so long, unlike so many constitutions that have perished along with the paper they were first written on. A cartoon of Iraq's newly-drafted constitution depicted as a fragile "castle of cards" — outwardly impressive but liable to collapse at any disturbance — makes a sharp visual contrast to this idea of a durable, living document, and is a useful prompt to ask whether such fragility could ever be said of India's own Constitution. …