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We tend to talk about the Indian Constitution like it were produced in a calm seminar room with scholars debating text and commas, surrounded by books and polished wood tables. But the truth is much more chaotic, almost violent in its surroundings. The Constitution was drafted while people were dying on trains between Delhi and Lahore, while cities burned, while entire villages disappeared. If I imagine that moment honestly, the process feels like a desperate attempt to hold a fragmenting land together, a kind of political bandaging of a wound that had not stopped bleeding.

This is the part most textbooks sanitise. They talk about principles, philosophy, and comparative sources. They rarely talk about the fact that while the Assembly was meeting, the members did not know if this experiment called India would survive even five years. Everyone writing on that floor was writing from the edge of a cliff. India was not a stable, unified nation. India was grief, panic, open wounds, and displacement. The Constitution was born in that fever.

In law school, we often read the Constitution as a rational document. But documents created in moments of existential fear are never purely rational. They are part prayer, part warning, part prophecy. That is why the Constitution is so obsessed with unity. That is why the Preamble is so loud and declarative. That is why the drafters created such a powerful centre, because they feared fracture more than anything else. They knew that the country was made of fault lines so deep that only an aggressively centralised architecture might hold it together.

When I read the Constituent Assembly Debates, what strikes me is how often the members reference not abstract philosophy but the street, the immediate reality outside the hall. They were aware that they were not drafting for a neutral world. They were drafting for a world where people were being stabbed on refugee trains, where Muslims and Hindus were both terrified, where the boundary line drawn with a pen turned into a line of fire. Our Constitution was drafted in the middle of this burning geography.

Ambedkar himself would say later that he felt the Assembly was drafting a Constitution for social conditions that had not yet evolved. He knew that the text was a leap of faith. And this is the part that makes him tragic and brilliant at the same time. He wrote in the hope that a future generation might be able to live the constitutional morality that the present generation could not. It was a forward-dated document. A letter addressed to the unborn Indian.

People fetishise the “borrowed” nature of the Indian Constitution. They mock the length. They say we collected foreign models like a collage. They do not understand that the drafters were trying to build a safety net with everything they could find, because the fall they were anticipating was not small. It was the collapse of the whole structure.

Humanly, I have always felt that the Constitution was not written out of arrogance. It was written out of fear. But fear can birth clarity. The clarity was that if India was to survive, there had to be a textual spine that could outlast governments and moods and mobs. The text itself had to be stronger than the people writing it.

Sometimes I wonder if this anxiety of fracture is exactly why India treats its Constitution like a sacred text. Not because we are all good citizens who read it every day, but because we know somewhere in our gut that this document is the only thing that prevents a relapse into fracture. The Constitution has become our political religion because we still live with the traumatic memory of Partition, even if we do not articulate it every day.

People often say our Constitution is too idealistic. I disagree. I think it is intentionally idealistic because it is psychologically compensating for the trauma of its birth. It is overcorrecting. It is trying to legislate dignity into a landscape that had seen the worst of human depravity just days earlier.

I do not think we should read the Constitution only with politeness and awe. We should read it with tenderness. Because it is the product of pain. And it is the product of late-night drafting sessions while families were fleeing, while riots broke out, while bodies were piling up. The drafters were not just legal technicians polishing clauses. They were witnesses to horror, trying to create a world where that horror would not be normalised.

The formation of the Indian Constitution was not a seminar. It was a survival act.

And maybe that is why the Constitution inspires a certain emotional loyalty in Indians who pay attention. Even those who criticise the State fiercely still turn to the Constitution as a refuge. Because this document was not created to celebrate who we were in 1947. It was created to protect who we might one day become.

The formation of the Indian Constitution is often presented as a rational drafting exercise. But it is perhaps the most emotionally charged legal event in our history. We must remember that. Because only then do we realise that this text is not dead parchment. It is the archive of a wound. And it is still healing.

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