Dear Babasaheb, your life and thinking were deeply invested in larger ideas of equality, fraternity and a just society. But one must routinely go back to your contribution to the making of the Constitution, because, won’t these goals remain distant and vague if we were to isolate them from the distortions of the Constitution that you shaped?

But your Constitution has become unrecognisable if not almost irrelevant amid bad practices and clever distortions. You were prescient when you warned that the Constitution would fail, not because it was not well crafted but because the people entrusted to work on it choose to make it a failure. This is not a lament about the document or a legal edifice, this is an immediate concern for the larger project you envisaged. Emancipation — and politics for emancipation — cannot be possible without the minimum of formal democracy. In undermining the Constitution, India’s rulers are pushing back against the impulse of emancipation. In the wounds inflicted on the Constitution, there is a story foretold: The basics of political emancipation are denied, delegitimised, and the idea of democratic resistance criminalised.

Three specific instances that make this story of urgent concern may be cited as these are directly connected to the Constitution. These instances are happening when formality will demand that those who inflict wounds on your Constitution also sing paeans to your greatness.

Babasaheb, your followers associate the ambition of one person-one vote-one value with you and the Constitution. You were rightly concerned with........

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