The Constitution in ideology and utopia: A Survey of ‘75 year’ commentaries on Constitution and the Supreme Court | Part I - Articles

AT A LITERATURE FESTIVAL last week, the anchor posed a crucial question to former CJI D.Y. Chandrachud – that the Indian Constitution had, lately, become central to political demonstration. For opposition parties and civil society, it had emerged as a symbol of resistance, and as an inviolable basic architecture of Indian governance that had faced abuse by the executive under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. For the ruling regime, it was the symbol of democratic survival despite Indira Gandhi’s national emergency. “The Constitution is not just print on a parchment,” Justice Chandrachud noted, “the Constitution is a dialogue between citizens.” 

Legal academic Martin Loughlin explains that constitutions have a “world-making capacity”, actively shaping political reality, not just being influenced from them. However, they are, he argues, ‘agnostic documents’ – sites of contestation – which are only interpreted through a ‘dialectic of ideology and utopia’. In other words, what the Constitution’s status within the larger national scenario becomes is very much hooked to how it is publicly debated and imagined by thinkers of differing ideologies, and their differing aspirations from the document.

The grand moment of the Indian Constitution, and the Supreme Court concluding seventy five years of enactment, and establishment, was marked by voluminous writings and verbal discussions by judges, lawyers, academics, activists, and politicians from across spaces and ideologies. What were some of the most coherent learnings that flowed from these conversations? What patterns could we draw by synthesising the whole lot of these conversations? How should we make sense of the engagement of the Hindu right, a political lobby which has traditionally opposed the Indian Constitution, with the modern republic’s founding document on the eve of its anniversary?

For this series of articles, we, at The Leaflet, synthesised a set of writings and speeches published specifically over 2024 and 2025 – 28 articles (published in newspapers or online portals), over 44 hours of panel discussions and speeches, and 5 books – to understand how the Constitution was discussed in public imagination. 

The few restrictions upon the scope of our sample literature was to bind ourselves to only pieces or speeches which were thematically or editorially framed as a 75 year review, were available in public records, and discussed in the English language. We do acknowledge, however, the possibility of some literature having slipped through the discussion.