Constitution as Means of Democratic Transformation

One classic reason given for having constitutions at all is the need to restrain the exercise of power. Modern states are extremely powerful — they hold something close to a monopoly over force and coercion — and if the institutions of such a state fall into the wrong hands, they can easily turn against the very people they were built to protect. Experience across the world shows that most states are prone to harming the interests of at least some individuals or groups. A constitution's basic rules are meant to check this tendency continuously, preventing the state from turning tyrannical. But the Indian Constitution asks us to go further than this purely restraining function: constitutions can also serve as a peaceful, democratic means of bringing about deep social transformation. For a country that had just emerged from colonial rule, adopting and writing a constitution was itself the first real exercise of political self-determination. Nehru captured both ideas. He argued that the demand for a Constituent Assembly represented a collective demand for full self-determination, because only a Constituent Assembly made up of elected representatives of the Indian people had the right to frame India's constitution without outside interference. He also insisted the Constituent Assembly was not merely a gathering of able lawyers or officials — it was, in his words, a 'nation on the move, throwing away the shell of its past political and possibly social structure, and fashioning for itself a new garment of its own making.' In this spirit, the Indian Constitution was deliberately designed to break the shackles of traditional social hierarchies and usher in a new era of freedom, equality and justice — not just to limit an already-exi …