The greatest experience with democracy has been a huge bet. Fortunately, people have worked how

THE Birth of Indian democracy is the fabric of legend. It was a moment of idealism and exubence as amazing, an act of faith so daring that the famous lawyer and scholar Kenneth Wheare qualified as The greatest liberal experience of the democratic government that the world had seen.

In its center was the country new constitution. This document, with its legendary Fundamental rights chapterTransformed into a blow, which had been the largest colony in the world into the greatest democracy in the world.

Think of the origins of this constitution. He promised freedom to a fifth of humanity. He embodied the infrannium of the world's largest electorate and the conversion of colonial subjects to citizens carrying rights.

This very exuberance has often been used to draw attention to its functional gaps. But today, 75 years old with Narendra Modi at the helm and the country ranked in 2024 as a electoral autocracy by V-VDEM (varieties of democracy) Institute, it has also become a powerful tool to highlight the contemporary problems of Indian democcys.

The notoriously fractured opposition was able to bring together a coalition to face the party of Modis Bharatiya Janata (BJP) during the general elections of 2024. He did so by calling on the liberal vision which underpins the Constitution. But have things really changed since the adoption of the constitutions in 1950?

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Unlike his American counterpart, Indias Constitution is not animated by the impetus to limit political power and guarantee public freedom. It is dominated by the idea of ​​allowing political power with the aim of social and economic reform.

He aimed to create an explicitly determined state to achieve what the founders of India believed to be social, economic and political justice. As the country's first prime minister said, Jawaharlal Nehru said, they liberated India through a new constitution to feed hungry people and dress the naked masses.

This is partly explained by the circumstances of the independent birth of the India. This was marked by violence, the upheaval of the score and the fear of Balkanization if the country was fragmented by religious, ethnic and linguistic minorities.

Pressures for the establishment of political sovereignty. And this upheaval collapsed against a population without instruction and without instruction without any experience of democracy and deep social divisions.

But the broader truth is that, for independent India leaders, civil freedoms have always been overshadowed by what they considered the most important concerns of destitution and social discrimination. They felt the urgency to secure the new state by which these concerns were to be treated.

This required substantial restrictions on civic freedoms and the granting of licenses of the coercive power of the state. From the start, the Constitution devoted centralization and executive supremacy.

He kept the Bureaucratic authoritarianism of his British colonial predecessor, placing the authority in the hands of bureaucrats appointed Rather than elected officials.

He also gave the power of the center on states, allowing him to create and dismember the provinces at will, and he gave to the executive power of the Legislative Assembly. The government can dictate when parliament is summoned or prorogged and can reign by executive decree in its absence.

This also gave the power of the State on the citizen. Almost all the fundamental rights guaranteed in Part III of the Constitution are qualified for nebulous reasons such as public order, state security or social harmony.

Rhetoric arrow on freedom has masked the reality that the Constitution has concentrated power to an unprecedented degree and has enabled a vast armory of coercive laws. As Somnath Lahiri, member of the Constituent Assembly of Bengal and leader of the Communist Party of India noticed sarcastically In a debate in April 1947, the provisions for fundamental rights seemed to have been supervised from the point of view of a police officer.

THE Preventive detention lawThe first legislation adopted in the new Democratic Republic in February 1950, allowed the government to encroach preventively without trial and without recourse to judicial control.

Its magnitude testifies to the fact that the Constitution was never conceived as a bulwark in the service of liberal individualism, all that the editors could have said at the time.

Dilute liberalism

Since the adoption of the constitutions, there have been more than 106 modifications and additions. They have more diluted the liberal intentions of the constitutions and even eroded the limited system of checks and counterweights.

THE tenth calendar Or the anti-defection law added in 1985 is a blatant example. It obliges individual legislators to vote according to the diktats of the party on the pain of disqualification.

This cemented the grip of the bosses of the parties on the legislative parties, the individual legislators without power and the degraded parliamentary surveillance. Since the threat of rebellions of the back-ban become negligibleMajoritarism has become rooted.

The concentration of power and its use by the executive are, by design, approved in the constitutional order India and the institutional structure, which has always been inhospitable land For all rights and freedoms beyond vote and elections. Anti-democratic tendencies operate by constitutional means, hampering the creation of the principles of legality and legislative primacy.

Given this situation, it is not surprising that almost all governments in India have used the powers given to them for these purposes.

Nehrus' rule saw a first amendment Which has radically reduced freedom of expression. He also introduced a Special calendar in the Constitution To protect unconstitutional legislation against judicial control and draconian legislation such as laws to allow preventive detention.

Daughter of Nehrus Indira Gandhi suspended the constitution For 21 months from 1975 to 1977 in a state of emergency, when his management was threatened. His government by force sterilized thousands As part of a sloppy population control program. However, everything was duly legal and constitutional.

The growing authoritarianism of Modis, his attacks against the opposition media and those who oppose him in the judiciary are therefore less a difference in the standard than a confirmation of this one. The real story lies elsewhere.

It is not the Constitution or the Legislative Assembly which is the most important question here. It was in fact the disclosure of India voters to deliver the parliamentary majority too often which has constituted the main control of the executive power.

For 25 years between 1989 and 2014, voters delivered divided mandates and coalition governments, which diluted and dispersed political power. Unsurprisingly, it caused the country Democracy clues increase. They reached a summit in the 2000s when the ruling coalitions included more than a dozen parties. But the underlying problems remained the same.

When the voters, unlike all expectations, elected another coalition in 2024, they understood what the liberal intelligentsia of countries has still not seized. It is not the famous Constitution, but the Indian voters themselves who, over the years, have held authoritarianism at a distance. Only time will tell us how long they will continue to do so.