This Republic Day comes at a time when constitutional questions are no longer just a matter of law reports and courts. Rather, they recur in quieter, more bureaucratic forms: Electoral rolls being redrafted with surgical precision, administrative preventive detention orders that outlast public attention, state policies to redraw the lines of equality not by great declaratory gestures on behalf of the general populace but by state governance at work (in more mundane forms).

These events are almost never made as spectacular constitutional collapses. They come in bits and pieces — via executive notifications, administrative freer will and political strategising. And often, they do so long before a writ petition is filed.

We persist in talking of the Constitution as if it lives mostly in courts — in judgments, benches, and reported law. Courts are important — and judicial review is one of the Constitution’s most essential safeguards. But the notion that constitutional meaning is created or defended only in courtrooms misunderstands the design of the Constitution as well as the relationship between power and the states in a modern republic. The Indian Constitution was never intended to be upheld on the bench alone. It was intended to be lived, contended with,........

© Indian Express