Charter of a Nation's Destiny

In Our Living Constitution, Shashi Tharoor breathes life into the legacy of India's supreme lawbook—revealing its grand architecture, noble origins, and enduring relevance that mesmerises the world even today. Excerpts:

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As we have seen, and as Gautam Bhatia has well described, the Constitution articulates a vision of Indian citizenship that is interwoven with Indian constitutional identity as a whole: secular, egalitarian, and non-discriminatory. Drawing upon universal humanist principles—and in specific and conscious contrast to the State of Pakistan—the Constituent Assembly crafted an idea of citizenship that rejected markers of identity, whether ethnic or religious. As Partition refugees streamed across the border in the largest exodus then known to humanity, fleeing religious violence, Alladi Krishnaswamy Ayyar, a veteran lawyer, advised the Assembly that, 'It is for you to consider whether our conception of citizenship should be universal, or should be racial or should be sectarian.'

The Constituent Assembly specifically debated whether it should recognize nationality (in an ethnic sense) or citizenship (in a non-racial, 'universal' sense) before opting for the latter. As K. M. Munshi observed: "The world is divided between the ideas of racial citizenship and democratic citizenship, and therefore, the words "born in India" become necessary to indicate that we align ourselves with the democratic principle."

Conversely, P. S. Deshmukh spoke for those who wanted an explicitly religious basis for citizenship: he proposed that 'every person who is a Hindu or a Sikh by religion and is not a citizen of any other State, wherever he resides' should be eligible to be Indian. This was rejected after a debate in which Ayyar reminded the Assembly that 'we are plighted to the principles of a secular State. The Constitution, in other words, linked citizenship very specifically to the idea of a non-communal, non-denominational polity, without distinction of religion, race, caste, or class—the idea of India again.