The Constitution we celebrate isn’t the one we live under

“Constitutional morality is not a natural sentiment. It has to be cultivated. We must realise that our people have yet to learn it. Democracy in India is only a top-dressing on an Indian soil which is essentially undemocratic.”

This is what Dr BR Ambedkar said in his final speech to the Constituent Assembly, on November 25, 1949. And 75 years later, that top-dressing is eroding. The soil – deeply stratified and undemocratic – is reclaiming the republic.

Today, India marks the 75th anniversary of Constitution Day. Floral tributes will be offered to the architects of our democracy. Speeches will praise the text that promised equality, liberty, and secularism. But this ritual reverence conceals a harsh truth: India has always lived under two constitutions.

One is the official 1950 Constitution drafted under Dr BR Ambedkar, which commits India to equality, opportunity, secularism, and social, economic, and political justice. It guarantees liberty of thought, expression, belief, faith, and worship. Secularism was formally codified in the Constitution and, since 1973, has been recognised as part of its Basic Structure. Even the BJP’s own constitution in Article IV notes the conception of positive secularism as ‘Sarva Dharma Samabhav’ – all religions are equal/equal respect for all religions.

Running alongside it is an unofficial, ‘original’ constitution of the mind, grounded in the Manusmriti’s hierarchical social code. The Manusmriti set out a rigid Chaturvarnya order that upheld caste supremacy, enforced a strict sexual division of labour, and prescribed occupational servitude for women and Dalits. A statue of Manu still stands outside the Rajasthan High Court.

For decades, these two visions existed in uneasy tension. That balance was finally shattered on August 15, 2025.

The great reversal and a stark contrast

Speaking from the ramparts of the Red Fort on India’s 79th Independence Day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi hailed the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) – approaching its centenary – as the “world’s largest NGO”. “In a way, RSS is the biggest NGO of the world. It has a history of 100 years of dedication,” explicitly praising the organisation as a vehicle for “nation-building through personal development” (vyakti nirman se rashtra nirman). 

This represented an extraordinary constitutional reversal for an organisation banned for hate and violence to an entity lauded as the epitome of service in civil society.

In 1925, the RSS was formed as an unregistered organisation by Brahmins (and its heads have all been Brahmins, except for one Rajput, Rajendra Singh). They sought the reconstruction and control of society, according to their ‘original’ constitution, idolising fascism in Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. The Constitution crafted by the Constituent Assembly was rejected by the RSS a week after its adoption because it was not based on the Manusmriti. 

The RSS has been banned three times – in 1948 following the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, during the Emergency in 1975–1977, and in 1992 after the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Each time it was banned, the RSS pledged loyalty to the Constitution while working towards its ‘original’ constitution. Prime Minister Modi's August 15 speech simply acknowledged this process.  

While the RSS has been elevated to premier NGO status, legitimate civil society is being crushed. The contrast is starkest in the case of climate activist and Magsaysay awardee Sonam Wangchuk. He was detained on September 26, 2025, under the stringent National Security Act (NSA) of 1980. 

Wangchuk has been a legitimate voice for Ladakh, a region where over 97 percent of the population belongs to Scheduled Tribes, advocating for statehood and inclusion under the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution. The representative of the indigenous population of Ladakh, who had been peacefully protesting for five years, was met with unprecedented brutality, culminating in his detention under the NSA. 

The Supreme Court issued notices challenging whether adequate grounds of detention were provided, with Justice Aravind Kumar noting: “Grounds have to be supplied as per judgments of this court. Why withhold it from his wife?”

But the State’s true nature emerged in a maze of Kafkaesque bureaucracy. The Union Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) cancelled the FCRA licence of Wangchuk’s organisation, SECMOL (Students’ Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh), alleging that it had received foreign funds to study matters related to “national sovereignty.”

Wangchuk’s wife, Gitanjali J Angmo, alleged that the MHA had “idiotically misinterpreted” SECMOL’s reply. She argued that the FCRA funds were intended to study “food sovereignty” (agricultural sustainability). The MHA’s order quoted SECMOL’s exact wording – “...food security and sovereignty, and organic farming...” – but with one critical alteration: it removed the comma after “sovereignty.” It then capitalised “Sovereignty,” shifting the meaning entirely and framing it as a reasonable restriction under Article 19. One punctuation mark – that is all that separates legitimate constitutional freedom of speech and expression from sedition in New India.

This bureaucratic hostility is not incidental. It flows from a more profound ideological shift towards a Hindu majoritarian order. In this order, Muslims, Dalits, and Adivasis are relegated to second-class citizens whose democratic demands are met with the coercive power of the State. 

Modi, a lifelong RSS pracharak, has spearheaded a political project that roots nationhood in cultural Hinduism rather than constitutional citizenship. Violence against Muslims and Dalits has escalated; key institutions have capitulated; and the Election Commission has crumbled, threatening the last pillar of political equality.

Judicial decisions, too, have aligned with this shift. The Supreme Court upheld the EWS (Economically Weaker Section) amendment, excluding 82 percent of lower castes from the quota, normalising majoritarian constitutionalism. The Citizenship Amendment Act still awaits a Constitutional validity review in a Court that has upheld exclusion before.

Inequality and religious supremacy – both antithetical to the Constitution’s Basic Structure – are increasingly accepted as the new normal.

The culmination of this shift was the Ayodhya case. In January 2024, Modi inaugurated the Ram Mandir on the ruins of a mosque, whose destruction the Supreme Court itself had called an “egregious violation of the rule of law.” Yet, the Court handed over the land for the temple’s construction. 

More recently, just a day before Constitution Day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, along with Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath and RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat, hoisted the dharma dhwaja, the saffron flag, at the Ayodhya temple. In his address, Yogi Adityanath exhorted the crowd to chant the slogan associated with the demolition of the Babri Masjid: “Goli laathi khaenge…mandir wahin banaenge.” The message was unmistakable: the State, its symbolism, and its leaders now openly align with a theocratic vision that displaces the Constitutional promise of secularism.

The limits of the Manusmriti: The lesson of Faizabad

Amid the apparent move towards a Hindu state, as our institutions surrendered one after the other, the ‘original’ constitution envisioned by the RSS contains its own contradiction – caste – which is the original divinely sanctioned fracture.

Dr Ambedkar termed the caste system as ‘graded inequality’ – hierarchies within hierarchies. You cannot build Hindu unity on a system that places 82 percent of Hindus (lower castes) below 18 percent (upper castes). Hindu majoritarianism rests on the ‘invention’ to hide the real numeric minority, which the Supreme Court of India recognised in the Champakam Dorairajan case.

India’s voting share data reveals the flaw. The BJP has not gone beyond 38 percent even after winning the 2019 elections with its most significant mandate. Upper castes comprise around 18 percent of the population; the majority of them are votaries of the BJP, while voting bank politics is attached only to lower castes. The BJP just needed 20 percent out of the 82 percent of Hindus belonging to lower castes.

Exit polls for the 2024 election showed the BJP winning hands down. They had proudly announced surpassing 400 seats and were coming after reservations for lower castes that are constitutionally entrenched. The opposition leader Rahul Gandhi waved a small, red bare text of Constitution and made it a battle between Dr Ambedkar’s Constitution and the Manusmriti – India’s ‘original’ constitution, which had concretised the caste system, putting ‘Untouchables’ at the permanent bottom.

The BJP candidate lost in the Faizabad Lok Sabha constituency – where PM Modi had inaugurated the temple four months prior – to Awadhesh Prasad, a veteran legislator who hails from a Scheduled Caste (SC) community, the Pasis (traditionally pig rearers). He won from a ‘General seat’, i.e., a non-reserved seat. The BJP lost in Uttar Pradesh, halting its juggernaut and limiting it to 240 seats. For now, democracy has been slightly corrected due to the existential threat to reservations, and the Caste Census has become a reality. 

Dr Ambedkar’s prescience came to define what unfolded in Ayodhya, within the Faizabad Lok Sabha constituency. The symbolism was profound: in the heart of the Hindu Rashtra project, a former Untouchable defeated communal politics by invoking Dr Ambedkar’s Constitution.

The Preamble to Dr Ambedkar’s Constitution aspires to “ensure equality of status and opportunity” and to secure to its citizens “justice-social, economic and political”. On Constitution Day 2025, the irony will be thick. We will praise the text of 1950 while living under the unwritten text of antiquity, wherein the ruling party has co-opted the lower castes through its welfare and rhetoric, as the 2025 Bihar elections illustrate. 

The question isn’t which constitution India celebrates on November 26, 2025; it’s what constitution India lives under. One is a document of liberation that requires constant cultivation. The other is a document of hierarchy that grows wild in our soil. In India, democratic constitutionalism is from ‘below’, which will hopefully reclaim our Secular Democratic Republic. 

Surendra Kumar is an Assistant Professor of Constitutional Law and Philosophy at Ramaiah College of Law, Bengaluru. With inputs from Raunaq Jaiswal. 

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