Conclusion

The previous chapter described the Constitution as a 'living document.' It is precisely the core features studied throughout this chapter — its philosophy — that give the Constitution this living, evolving stature. Legal provisions and institutional arrangements are not fixed for all time; they depend on the changing needs of society and on the underlying philosophy that society has adopted, and the Constitution gives ongoing expression to that philosophy. The institutional arrangements studied throughout this whole book rest on a core, commonly agreed vision — a vision that emerged historically through India's own long struggle for independence. The Constituent Assembly was the platform on which this vision was stated, refined, and eventually given legal-institutional form; the Constitution, in that sense, is the embodiment of this larger vision. Many people have said that the best one-paragraph summary of this vision — of the philosophy of the Constitution as a whole — is to be found in the Preamble to the Constitution. The Preamble, beyond stating the various objectives the Constitution pursues, makes a strikingly humble claim: the Constitution is not simply 'given' to the people by some body of great men, but is instead prepared and adopted by 'We, the people of India...' In other words, the people are themselves the makers of their own destiny, and democracy is the very instrument they have used to shape their present and their future. In the more than five decades since the Constitution was drafted (at the time of writing), courts and governments have disagreed sharply on many interpretations, the Centre and the States have had many differences of opinion, and political parties have fought bitterly — Indian politics, as you will go on to study, has been full of problems and shortcomings. And yet, if you were to ask almost any politician or ordinary citizen, you would find that nearly everyone continues to share in the vision embodied in the Constitution: the shared wish to live together and prosper together on the basis of the principles of equality, liberty an …