Begin with an older vocabulary for the duty. In the third chapter of the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna tells Arjuna that even one who has nothing personal left to gain should still act loka-sangraham evapi sampashyan ~ with an eye to the holding-together of the world (3.20, and again at 3.25). Lokasangraha is not private charity or personal merit; it is the maintenance of the social and moral order, the labour of keeping a habitable world so that others are not driven, by neglect, onto the path of ruin.

Sankara, in his commentary, reads it as the duty of the wise and the powerful to keep society from sliding into disorder; Radhakrishnan renders it simply as the maintenance of the world order. The concept is, in a precise sense, a thread ~ a terse imperative that means little until it is unspooled into the particular duties of a particular office, in the way a sutra means little until its commentary unfolds it. In a republic that office is the State’s, and the thread reaches it as an old form of rajadharma. A polity that can survey every receding metre of its shoreline, as this one has, and still leave the people who stood on it without status has measured the land and forgotten the citizen.

The point is not merely homiletic, for the Constitution already contains the commentary the thread requires. Article 21’s guarantee of life has, for four decades, been read to mean far more than survival. In Francis Coralie Mullin v. Administrator, Union Territory of Delhi (1981), the Supreme Court, through Justice Bhagwati, held that it means the right to live with human dignity, including the bare necessaries such as adequate food, clothing and shelter; in Olga Tellis v. Bombay Municipal Corporation (1985), that it embraces the right to livelihood, since to strip a person of the means of living is to deprive them of life itself; in Chameli Singh v. State of Uttar Pradesh (1996), that the right to shelter is a component of the right to life; and in Subhash Kumar v. State of Bihar (1991), that it includes the........

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