The difficulties of the world’s oldest and largest democracies, the US and India, raise a question more fundamental than how their constitutions might be ‘tweaked.’ Can constitutional design by itself protect democracy against those who acquire power through democratic means and then undermine the institutions that brought them to office?
Plato identified this vulnerability long ago: democracy can furnish its own destroyers with the legitimacy of the popular vote. The American founders understood the danger and constructed elaborate checks and balances to contain it. Yet, James Madison also understood that institutions ultimately depend upon the people who operate them.
No constitutional arrangement can be entirely proof against officials willing to corrupt it or an executive powerful enough to bend the other branches to its will.
Britain suggests a different route to democratic durability. Its democracy rests less on any written constitution than on conventions accumulated through centuries of conflict over sovereign power.
Magna Carta, the execution of Charles I, parliamentary supremacy and even the rituals surrounding the monarch mark stages in the long construction of restraints on power. Their force lies precisely in having become customary.
What Alexis de Tocqueville called “habits of the mind” have become embedded in civil society. A constitution can be amended or discarded; habits acquired through generations of political struggle are harder to erase.
This suggests that the deepest protection of democracy lies neither in constitutions nor institutions, indispensable though both are, but in a widely shared habit of freedom.
Democracy cannot simply be established by fiat, as American interventions in West Asia and Afghanistan demonstrated. Nor can enlightened constitution-makers manufacture it overnight. Political liberty becomes durable when citizens themselves instinctively resist arbitrary power.
This distinction may help explain the potentially divergent prospects of the US and India.
American democracy was not born fully liberal. America’s 1776 Revolution was initially a struggle against British rule, while the constitutional promise of liberty co-existed with slavery and political exclusion. Liberal democracy had to be enlarged through the Civil War and, much later, the Civil Rights movement. Its institutions are therefore the product not merely of constitutional design, but of repeated struggles over the meaning of freedom.
This gives reason to hope that American civil society retains sufficient democratic habits to withstand powerful demagogues.
India’s history is more troubling. The Constitution created an extraordinarily ambitious liberal democracy, but its social foundations were less secure. Ambedkar warned that democracy in India was still “skin deep.” The national movement mobilized millions, but its overriding objective was independence from foreign rule, not a prolonged popular struggle for individual liberty against indigenous forms of social and political domination.
Liberal values were strongly held by leaders such as Nehru and sections of India’s 19th-century intelligentsia, but they did not influence broad civil society to the same extent. India’s democracy was therefore, to a significant degree, an enlightened construction from above.
The debate between Gandhi and Tagore illuminates the problem. Both conceived swaraj (self-rule) more broadly than simply expelling the British, and Gandhi himself pursued important social reforms. Nevertheless, Gandhi gave political independence overriding priority.
Tagore feared that replacing foreign rulers with Indian ones would accomplish little unless Indians also liberated themselves inwardly. Political struggle had to become a “battle for the mind”: freedom required atmashakti (self-power), an inner capacity to resist domination irrespective of whether the ruler was foreign or native. His words were prophetic.
Ambedkar approached the same problem through the entrenched inequalities of caste. Here the contrasting trajectories of northern and southern India are suggestive.
In much of south India, non-Brahmin, Self-Respect and related movements challenged established hierarchies from below. They used electoral politics to acquire power, widened access to education and economic opportunity, and altered the social structure itself.
They did something constitutional proclamation alone could not: accustomed subordinated groups to asserting equality and resisting inherited authority. This may help explain why the south has resisted political projects of northern origin.
The Emergency itself demonstrates the fragility of India’s democratic culture. Its defeat in 1977 is often interpreted as proof of the electorate’s instinctive attachment to liberty.
The reality was more complex.
Opposition drew strength from several currents, including organizations whose commitment to liberal values was questionable. More importantly, the erosion of institutional and personal freedoms has generated less sustained resistance.
Constitutional checks are also structurally weaker than in the US: executive and legislative authority are closely intertwined, appointments to key institutions are vulnerable to executive influence and Indian federalism provides weaker counterweights to central power.
Constitutions, of course, matter. Checks and balances, an independent judiciary, federalism, a free press and genuinely competitive elections are essential. But these are defensive walls, not democracy’s foundations. Walls may eventually fall if nobody is prepared to defend them.
India’s unfinished democratic task is therefore deeper than constitutional reform. The freedom struggle succeeded magnificently in ending foreign rule, but political independence and human freedom are not synonymous. Tagore’s “freedom of the mind,” Ambedkar’s struggle against social hierarchy and Tocqueville’s democratic “habits of the mind” converge on the same insight: liberty must be embedded in civil society to survive.
India may require, in a metaphorical but profound sense, another freedom struggle—against the acceptance of arbitrary power. Its object would be to make personal liberty, equality before the law and resistance to regression habits of citizenship. Democracy’s ultimate safeguard, rather than the Constitution in a glass case, is a society that has acquired such a deep habit of freedom.
The author is a retired Indian Administrative Service officer and former secretary, Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council.