Context

A republic is made robust and kept alive by its people. In its current form, the Indian republic marks 73 years of maintaining a dynamic balance.

Directly elected representation

•  It is to the credit of our people that today we have a pyramidal three-layered elected representative system that governs us.
• This system today has over 3 million elected representatives (a million of them women), over 4,000 elected to the state legislatures and over 500 in the Parliament.
• This scale of directly elected representation, perhaps, can be seen nowhere else in the world.

Moral and spiritual basis of the Constitution

• In Pilgrimage to Freedom, K M Munshi writes, “our Constitution has a moral background — to secure justice for every section of our society; as also a spiritual basis — to preserve and protect all religions in the exercise of their functions”.
• The challenges continue in securing justice for every section of our society.
• The Backward Classes, the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes and the poor across all categories clamour for better opportunities and affordable justice.
• What Munshi calls the spiritual basis of our Constitution in having to preserve and protect all religions is also seen under stress.
• When the right to practise one’s religion is denied or threatened, the silence of the thinking public or the media weakens that constitutionally embedded protection.

Challenges posed by social media

• Through the power of technology and its capacity to broadcast at mass scale, an otherwise useful tool, social media, has become a challenge and sometimes a threat to one or several of the rights enshrined in our Constitution.
• Curtailing them to protect the rights of citizens is seen as trampling upon the right to free speech.
• Without any action, the damage caused to social harmony by such rampant false news can result in people losing faith in the Constitution itself.

Constitution as a living, dynamic process

• Our Constitution is the most amended of all constitutions in the world.
• If there are more than 100 amendments made to the Constitution, there are more than 1,500 laws that have been repealed because they have outlived their times.
• These deadwood laws, by remaining on paper, occasionally became a weapon in the hands of rent-seekers.
• Their removal, as a part of administrative reform, has kept the role of the executive transparent and accountable.
• That the Constitution is always evolving is best exemplified by the 101st amendment which rolled out the Goods and Services Tax.
• his amendment brought in a unified indirect tax regime by subsuming most of the indirect taxes of the Centre and the states.
• Yet to complete five full years, the GST Council has stood the test of challenging times even in its initial years.
• It augurs well for cooperative federalism.

Conclusion

Our Constitution has served us well in these seven decades. Several republics in the post-imperial era have rejected their earlier constitutions and tested new ones. It is the people who can keep the republic robust and alive.

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