As protests against the discriminatory Citizenship Amendment Act continue to roil the country, the Constitution has emerged as the protagonist of the fledgling movement. At rallies and marches, tens of thousands of people are holding up the document, reading it aloud together and expressing concern that the government is violating the Constitution with a legislation that adds a religious criterion for citizenship and discriminates against Muslims.
Many observers are taking heart from the protestors’ evocation of the Constitution. “We are witnessing now a rediscovery of the republic – and of our Constitution as its blazing torch,” remarked historian Rohit De, whose 2018 book A People’s Constitution seems to have prefigured the recent protests. The special attention protestors have paid to the Preamble has been particularly revealing of how they are approaching the Constitution: not merely to a legal document but, as Gautam Bhatia, author of The Transformative Constitution, notes, as “a charter of values and principles; a vision of a free, just, and equal society”.
The Constitution is certainly a powerful symbol with which to challenge the current regime’s majoritarian vision of India. However, when the Constitution goes from symbol to strategy and when preserving the Constitution goes from a unifying chant to the raison d’être of protest, there is cause for concern. If the goal...
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