Constitutionalism to Circumscribe Constitution

Babasaheb Ambedkar presciently warned "however good a Constitution may be, if those who are implementing it are not good, it will prove to be bad”. Sadly today, that is precisely what is happening. Those sworn to uphold the constitutional idea of India have spearheaded an unprecedented assault on it. Hailing India’s Parliament as the supreme temple of democracy, its caretakers have reduced Parliament to theatre, are systematically dismantling federalism, gerrymandering democracy and circumscribing citizen’s rights and freedoms.

BJP misusing legislation & legislative procedures to bulldoze its agenda

Consider for example, parliamentary sessions in the last few years. The very space where our Constitution was forged has methodically been emasculated to rubber-stamp policies and legislations that are at their core, profoundly anti-constitutional and anti-people. What the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government is doing to, and through Parliament transcends mere procedural violations. It is methodically leveraging constitutional mechanisms to push through their avowed agenda of “One Nation, One Party, and One Leader”.

Circumscribing parliament

Over the past few sessions, a conspicuous modus operandi has emerged. The government dedicates substantial parliamentary time to performative debates on emotive cultural issues, be it five days on Vande Mataram or protracted discussions on historical figures, only to ramrod through controversial legislative amendments in the final hours of the session with minimal scrutiny or deliberation. Bills are introduced and passed on the same day, often in a few hours, giving no time for legislators to actually study bills (in this winter session, seven of the nine bills were passed within a week; many of those nine bills were introduced only in the last week.

This is a recurring pattern from the 17th Lok Sabha, where 58% of the 179 bills passed were rushed through within two weeks of their introduction). Bills are introduced and passed with such alacrity that even a cursory reading is rendered impossible, let alone the comprehensive committee scrutiny that complex legislation demands (in the ongoing 18th Lok Sabha, only 11 of the 42 bills introduced have been sent to committees. This mirrors the BJP government’s track record from the 17th Lok Sabha, when only 16% of the bills passed were referred to committees, down from 71% between 2009-2014, when the United Progressive Alliance Government (UPA) was in power). This is coupled by the partisanship of the presiding officers (both the Speaker of the Lok Sabha and the Chairperson of the Rajya Sabha) who have demonstrably abandoned any pretence of neutrality, and consistently facilitate the government's agenda whilst circumscribing the opposition's ability to meaningfully interrogate bills.

From the BJP’s viewpoint, this strategy serves a dual purpose. On one hand, it satiates the BJP's ideological base by inserting cultural nationalism in parliamentary discourse. On the other, it ensures that substantive legislation with far-reaching implications receives cursory examination at best, and policymaking is exclusively centralised with the Executive.

Faced with such tactics, the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA) parties naturally resort to disruptive tactics of civil disobedience. However, each parliamentary walkout, each disruption captured on camera, each unedifying scuffle in the well of the Houses and each symbolic intervention that doesn’t demand accountability of the government serves to reinforce the BJP's insidious narrative that Parliament itself is a dysfunctional institution incapable of governing a continental-sized nation like India.

This narrative construction is not accidental but rather forms the ideological scaffolding for the BJP's long-cherished ambition of transitioning India toward a presidential system of governance – a system that would further concentrate power in the Executive whilst marginalising legislative oversight and federal checks and balances. Logic dictates that if progressives are to successfully defend parliamentary democracy, they must remain present in Parliament to forensically document and challenge each procedural irregularity, each substantive violation of constitutional norms, and each atavistic bill. The battle for parliamentary democracy cannot be waged from outside the Parliament.

Circumscribing federalism

Secondly, among the numerous long-term impacts of the legislations being enacted by the BJP government include over-centralisation of fiscal and political powers with the Union government. The recent repealing of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) exemplify the BJP's strategy of using ostensibly technical amendments to fundamentally alter citizen rights and freedoms, as well as India's federal compact. Again, pandering to their core vote, the BJP replaced MGNREGA with Viksit Bharat-Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) or VB-G RAM G Bill, 2025. Like with other equally important legislations, the BJP government uploaded the VB-G-RAM G Bill to a portal for legislators to study it at 05:00 pm on December 17, 2025 and expected them to read, analyse and move amendments in the next 45 minutes.

Whilst INDIA parties legitimately focused on the circumscribing of workers' rights and entitlements through BJP’s amendments, the equally insidious outcome is the BJP government fiscally asphyxiating state governments. The VB-G RAM-G Act essentially reduces states to municipal corporations with a plethora of programmatic obligations but no powers to raise funds. It thus effectively transfers additional financial burdens onto states who are already reeling from reduced tax devolution (which is at less than 32% of tax revenues, as against the last Finance Commission’s promised 41%), and diminished support for Centrally Sponsored Schemes (from 2019-2024, the union government underfunded 71.9% of the 906 Centrally Sponsored Schemes).

Consequently, states are being pushed into debt to fund their welfare schemes. It is no coincidence that half of India’s larger states have added more than 10 percentage points to their debt-to-state-GDP ratios in the last decade, and the share of the market borrowings by the states has risen from 51.4% of total state debts in March 2018 to 66% by March 2024. Plus, states are being forced to take loans from the union government, which have jumped from 3.8% (2017) to 7.2% in 2024 (2022). This fiscal squeeze will push all states into high debt by 2027, as a National Council of Applied Economic Research report calculates. This is no accident but rather a calculated strategy to render state governments increasingly dependent on the union government's largesse.

Similarly, consider the Sustainable Harnessing and Advancement of Nuclear Energy for Transforming India Bill (SHANTI) Bill 2025 that was passed at the fag end of the winter session. This legislation seems to have been passed to placate US president Donald Trump who passed the National Defence Authorisation Act just two days after the SHANTI Act was passed. But even more problematically, the SHANTI Act also reorients liability frameworks in ways that abdicate both private corporate responsibility and the union government’s duty to Indians, whilst transferring the entire burden of potential nuclear disasters onto state governments.

Should a nuclear disaster occur (an eventuality that, whilst improbable, carries civilisational-level consequences as demonstrated by the Fukushima disaster, which required approximately Rs 16 lakh crores for rehabilitation and resettlement), state governments would bear almost complete responsibility for managing the fallout whilst the union government's nuclear liability fund remains capped at a paltry Rs 3,000 crores (through Special Drawing Rights). This upturns the promise of cooperative federalism. The Union government arrogates to itself the power to make policy decisions with far-reaching implications for states, whilst simultaneously abdicating responsibility for the consequences of those decisions. It is difficult to conceive of a more brazen violation of the federal principle.

This kind of centralisation must be read in conjunction with the systematic interference state governments face from governors (increasingly functioning as constitutional hitmen, as a former Governor characterised it). Governors appointed by the BJP government routinely withhold assent for bills passed by opposition-ruled state legislatures, interfere with appointments to state positions, and impede the functioning of state legislatures and governance. This pincer movement (fiscal strangulation from above and gubernatorial obstruction from within) is methodically circumscribing the powers of state governments and their ability to deliver on their welfare obligations to the people of India. Slowly and surely, this is also pushing India away from a federal structure toward a unitarian form of governance.

The implications are profound. In a federal polity as diverse as India, the vitiation of federalism strikes at the very heart of the constitutional compact. India's framers consciously designed Indian federalism as a mechanism of national integration to accommodate disparate regions, linguistic communities and cultural identities into a single nation-state. Undermining federalism therefore isn’t just a policy choice (driven by a desire to turn India into a developed nation like China, an often cited excuse to brush away legitimate concerns) but rather an existential assault on the constitutional idea of India.

One nation, one leader and one party

Thirdly, and perhaps most consequentially for India, the decennial census operations commencing in March 2026 will inexorably be followed by the delimitation exercise that will redraw parliamentary and assembly constituencies across the nation. Both processes have been specifically insulated from judicial review, which means that the government can essentially ramrod through whatever demographic determinations and constituency demarcations it deems politically expedient without any institutional checks (primarily because the union government controls a majority in the process for appointing members to the Delimitation Commission).

The precedent established by the delimitation exercise in Assam offers a troubling preview of what awaits India. Constituencies were gerrymandered in ways that ensure certain demographic groups and areas that tend to support opposition parties were systematically disadvantaged in the electoral process. Applied nationally, such gerrymandering could entrench BJP dominance for generations irrespective of actual voting preferences. This will inevitably be exacerbated by the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) – which despite official denials, functions as a thinly camouflaged variant of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). The SIR process will determine who is counted in the census, which in turn determines how constituencies are delimited, which ultimately determines who exercises political power.

This concatenation of census, SIR and delimitation represents perhaps the most comprehensive attempt to structurally engineer electoral outcomes since independence. And because the entire process is insulated from judicial review, there exists no mechanism to challenge whatever demographic manipulations or electoral gerrymandering occurs. Southern and North-Eastern states stand to be particularly disadvantaged by this exercise. Having successfully implemented population control measures and invested in human development, these states now face the perverse prospect of being electorally penalised for their developmental success through reduced parliamentary representation. Meanwhile, states that failed to control population growth will gain additional parliamentary seats, thereby fundamentally altering India's electoral map in ways that privilege certain regions over others. This raises profound questions about India's future as a federal democracy.

These seemingly disparate initiatives – the emasculation of Parliament, the repealing of MGNREGA, the SHANTI Act, the census and delimitation exercises and the SIR – should be seen as constituent elements of an insidious strategy to centralise power in an unprecedented manner. Inevitably they will transform India from a federal and parliamentary polity into a nation-state governed by “one leader, one party and one ideology”. Essentially, the BJP government is (mis)using the Constitution to undermine the Constitution. Every legislative initiative and procedural mechanism is technically legal, yet the cumulative effect represents a profound attack on the constitutional idea of India that India’s framers envisioned.

Progressives need to urgently overhaul progressive strategies

The INDIA parties clearly realise that it is no longer business as usual. That is why they have been experimenting with creative tactics to force the government to pay heed and be accountable to the people’s representatives. That partly explains parliamentary disruptions and walkouts, which the BJP cynically caricatures as an impediment to policymaking (ignoring its own responsibilities and conduct for the past decade). INDIA has bee compelled to occasionally resort to such disruptions in an effort to cut through the manufactured media-blackout and to force the government into course-correction. However, perhaps it’s time to revisit this strategy, primarily because it has been 11 years since the BJP government has refused to pay heed to even basic requests, and instead censored legislators by switching off microphones, suspending them, truncating Question Hour, censoring Sansad Television etc.

The BJP may have obstinately dug it’s heels in partly because disrupting Parliament was a tactic that it perfected between 2009-2014, when it held Parliament hostage for whole sessions. Given this, disruptions most likely don’t faze the BJP. Sadly, they provide it with the ammunition it seeks to delegitimise Parliament. Therefore there is an urgent need for some rethinking because the BJP government is clearly leveraging any walkover to not just ramrod through regressive and anti-people legislations, but also further consolidate power.

To counter the government’s malicious agenda, INDIA parties must instead communicate seemingly technical legislative amendments to their lived implications for our people. This can be done by going directly to the people. Leveraging innovative tactics like the Bharat Jodo Yatra or the Samvidhan programmes (which in essence were mass-contact programmes), which leader of opposition Rahul Gandhi spearheaded. This is especially important because the average Indian is already grappling with declining consumption, mushrooming unemployment, rising household debt and numerous socio-cultural disruptions.

Given these multiple pressures, the silent majority may not immediately grasp the significance of delimitation or gerrymandering, or the adverse implications of ending MGNREGA amendments, or the SHANTI Act or the Insurance Act to their daily lives. This  shift in operational methodology by INDIA parties becomes even more essential because sections of the Indian media do not objectively apprise citizens of the dangerous implications of legislation and policies that impede their rights and freedoms, and the pursuit of a better life.

Given INDIA faces the entire apparatus of the state (as LoP Rahul Gandhi has repeatedly emphasised) more strategic thinking and manoeuvring is desperately needed. Empowering new talent willing to experiment with innovative disruptions (and who won’t bend before government intimidation) would create fresh momentum as INDIA starts preparing for 2029. Adopting from what a wise man said, INDIA needs to operate like Bhagwan Shiv’s baraat, which has all manner of creatures who work unitedly towards a larger goal.

There are lakhs of brilliant and committed legislators (as also spokespersons, social media influencers and workers) waiting and wanting to be constructively deployed. Like Mahatma Gandhi did (by sensitively investing and empowering each party worker), INDIA parties must invest even further in mentoring workers, and deploy them constructively as per their respective capabilities, thereby conjoining them in a fellowship. India’s freedom struggle is a lived testament of how successful such investments can be.

Progressive parties must therefore wage a sophisticated, sustained and clairvoyant campaign to defend the Republic's foundational principles. Even though we are defending a dream that our founders collectively breathed life into, we need to have a targeted plan to defend that dream. This means an urgent overhauling of parliamentary and political strategy, one that prioritises persistent presence over performative protest, forensic documentation over theatrical disruption, and substantive engagement over symbolic resistance (walkouts, press-conferences and protests, sporadic posts on social media etc.). This also requires consciously investing in institutions, and building durable coalitions with likeminded forces (both inside and outside the formal political space).

Whether progressives can rise to this challenge to defend the broader constitutional compact, and whether they can develop the strategic sophistication to counter the BJP's multi-pronged assault on the nation – these questions will determine India's trajectory in the coming decades. Frankly, the stakes are existential. India stands at an inflection point where decisions made in the coming months and years will determine whether it remains a federal parliamentary democracy that accommodates its immense diversities or transforms into a centralised unitary state that privileges certain regions, religions and political formations over others.

What is abundantly clear is that the status quo is no longer tenable. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this constitutional crisis, shrink from the service of their country. But those who recognise the existential nature of this struggle, who understand that they are not merely fighting for partisan advantage but for the soul of the Republic itself- must urgently band and work together for the greater together. The choice, and the consequences, are ours alone to bear.

Pushparaj Deshpande is Samruddha Bharat Foundation’s Director & Editor of The Great Indian Manthan (Penguin). Parsa Mufti is Strategy Head at Samruddha Bharat Foundation & a Schwarzman Scholar.

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