 The Republic Day Parade, if you remember the the bit that many of us liked as children was when the state sort of came on display, but was also a way of sort of demonstrating this certain kind of diversity. So instead of pushing a one size fits all one language, one national dress, one way of being Indian, there were various performances that showed there were multiple ways of being Indian. I think there was a lot of surprise, agreeable surprise at the nature of the protest that took place a few years ago, where there was a kind of collective invocation of the preamble and collective acts of reading. And while the scale and the focus of the preamble was unusual, I'd like to remind everyone that the Constitution has long been a site of both protest and of hope right from the days of its actual drafting and writing. I'm working on a new book project with co-author Oning Chani and we're looking at claims made in the 1940s and 50s around the Constitution and it's quite clear that groups across India, including sort of tribals living deep in the interiors of places like Basta and Jharkhand, people living in the northeast, people in towns and villages were actively engaged and thinking about the process of Constitution making. And they saw this as something that would affect their lives in the future and right from the early processes of Constitution writing in Delhi and consultations throughout the country, individuals in groups sort of reached out to sort of push for their vision into the Constitution. So the Constitution operated both as a sword and a shield, a sword to advance certain kinds of claims. These could be claims as minorities, the sort of push by Dalit groups to ensure that untouched property was abolished. These also became kind of sought to advance claims later on, claims that weren't originally there in the Constitution text and perhaps most clearly campaigns like the right to employment or the right to food, which began as social movements, then entered the courtrooms and then took a kind of legislative form with Narega and the right to food provisions. More conventionally, it also began to be used as a shield to protect certain kinds of interest. And we see this, you know, again right from the 1940s when civil liberties groups started to use provisions that draft Constitution to critique acts of the Congress government just after independence. So even before the Constitution came into force, there was a kind of constitutional framework that was being used to challenge and argue against the government. It takes more unusual forms. When we see groups that are often, you know, they don't have a electoral voice, they find themselves marginalized electoral space, they often find themselves turning to the Constitution as a kind of form of social contract. So for example, the Dharbar Mahila Swamvara Committee, one of India's largest organizations of sex workers, sort of gives its members a pamphlet with Article 19 framing their claims as a part of right to livelihood very, very firmly or over the years artists and writers have often turned to Article 191A to sort of make their assertions to protect freedom of speech and expression. There have of course been attempts to alter and change the Constitution and it's striking that in the post-emergency elections, one of the major clients of the Janta Party was to restore the Constitution to its original text and its original intent and the overwhelming majority Janta Party got showed there was a kind of political consensus around that. There have been a couple of attempts, one with the Swaran Singh Committee under Mrs Gandhi and one under the Vajpayee government, to radically rewrite or restructure the Constitution and in both cases, they got stern pushback from both political parties and society and the projects were eventually dropped. What I want to point out is that therefore the Constitution being a site of protest or political mobilization is not new. The examples you gave, even of protests which lead to burning the Constitution and the other examples are of during the anti-Hindi movement in the South, there were some examples of people burning the official language questions. Those are also part of this rich history of protest and the fact that many of those who protested by denying or burning the Constitution actually turned to it is a sign of constitutional resilience. One of my favorite anecdotes is at the time of independence, the Communist Party of India and several of the parties on the right were very critical of the Constitutional text arguing that it was not authentic or a bourgeois document. But one of the first cases the Indian Supreme Court heard was a case involving the rights of a Communist Party member who had been accused of unprevented protection and he was being defended by the President of the Hindu Mahasabha. So it really became a platform where different interests would come in. So I think the protests that happened a couple of years ago and continuing conversations show that there's a deep resilience that the Constitution carries in public imagination and the resilience is more than the exact textual legalistic reading of the document. And I think that's why it's striking that the protests that took place didn't turn to the article in equality or didn't turn to say the article on the due process but really focused on the preamble, which conveyed for the people reading it a certain kind of spirit behind the making of the Indian Republic and a spirit that guided them as a spirit that guided the compact of citizens with this Republic. So I think there's a couple of things one needs to unpack here. The first of course is what do we mean by secularism and a lot of people, even those who are quite well informed often read this as a kind of classical liberal definition, which is separation of religion and political space and a practice that has almost never been followed in India or indeed much of the world, even in places that would describe them as secular. This is the sort of very European understanding of secularism. In India secularism, especially in the 1920s and 30s, came to mean something very specific and was often in opposition to the idea of communalism, which by itself is not a negative term at all, it just means that the kind of unit of political activity is the community. So secularism, if communalism meant that one's political interests were defined by the community they belong to, a position taken by parties across the board from the Muslim League to the Hindumasabha, secularism meant something different. It meant the idea that multiple communities could have shared political interests. The term secularism formally enters the constitution only during the emergency and much is made of this fact. So a couple of things to keep in mind. Firstly, that many of the emergency amendments were actually erased, written back, and the term secularism and also the phrase unity and integrity of India, which are part of the preamble, were additions during the emergency, but the Jatta Party chose not to remove them, which shows a kind of shared political consensus around the value of secularism as it was understood. So secondly, I mean, it's not as if at the time of drafting, while the term might not have been present and Ambedkar says this in the context of what secularism and socialism says, we don't need to have a specific term, the provisions of the constitution make it quite clear what the state stands for. So the state, the constitution made it quite clear that India would have no discrimination on the grounds of religion. It accommodated a flexible idea of equality. So it said nothing prevented the state for making special provisions to create substantive equality for groups that were systematically disenfranchised. It protected religious freedom, but it also curb religious freedom on the grounds of public order, health, morality, etc. So if we look at the kind of conversation at the time of constitution making, it's striking how many letters the assembly gets from Orthodox Hindu and Muslim groups. Saying things like freedom of religion and secularism means untouchability cannot be abolished or that Hindu law or Muslim law cannot be interfered with. But it was quite clear to the members of the assembly that the kind of promise of secular citizenship meant that in certain ways, interests of religions could be curbed to lead to social advancement. So the idea of secularism in India has not been a kind of dramatic separation of church and state, but the idea that the state stands equidistant from all religions and the state will intervene in religious matters when certain other values become strong. I think there's been a lot of documentation about ways in which inclusiveness might have changed this political practice. But this has not led to, and Supreme Court has multiple times ruled that secularism is part of India's constitutional basic structure. So if, at least legally and politically, if there are attempted dramatic changes to state practice and citizenship, the courts should and ought to give these issues of hearing and uphold the meaning of secularism as defined by the constitution. But what is also clear is that the constitution doesn't, it's a text, it is only as effective as to the extent that is defended both by institutions like judges and politicians, but also by civil and political society, that is political parties and society groups. So unless these values are talked about, inculcated and defended, these ideas on paper have little meaning. What gives me hope is that in the Indian context, there's a long history of defending many of these values, both on the court and on the electoral battlefield, and even on the streets. The Indian constitution has a federal structure with a unitary bias. And it's important to understand why there's a unitary bias. So in 1946, the sort of drafters of the constitution were dealing with the fact of partition. And also the challenges of integrating numerous territories, which have never been under a rate of government that was based in Delhi. So there was deep concerns of separation and disappeared as tendencies. Secondly, there was also a concern that for those who were part of the first independent independent government, these range from, you know, Nehru to Ambedkar. The idea was that independence by itself would not have any meaning unless it led to social economic transformation. And the idea was that one could only do this transformation through a strong central government, which could draw funds from across the country and also plan for the whole country. And one could argue that in the 1940s and 50s, these provisions are necessary, they made sense, given the kind of climate of the time. In fact, the success of India's democracy, the longevity of its state structure has been that it was able to accommodate dissent and bring in, you know, a range of people and territories that had never been accustomed to a certain kind of centralized rule. To rightly say, in the in the in the early years, every time there's been a party which overwhelming majority that has been a tendency to govern from the center and not from the region. I don't think this happens just when there is a national party you leave so the early years of the Congress party right after the 1960s, and the BJP governments in the late 90s and the early 2000s were primarily federally oriented parties that strong state governments and they had strong regional leaders even though they were national parties, they were guided by local regional politics regional identities. There's obviously been a change, which is tied to political funding, the nature of political parties that has turned see the Congress in the 70s and 80s, and maybe today more centralized than they were in the past, and this has also led to a lot of decision and at the center rather than at the regional level. This is, this is, again, a test of how a quality is so in the past the strong unitary quality led by the Congress was weakened with the rise of regional parties across the country. We had about two decades of coalition governments in the 90s where, even though Indian institutional centralized a lot of decision making became share and accommodative. Contrary to the ideas that these would lead to, you know, big governments, we now know that many of these coalition governments in the 90s, including the short-lived United Front or the watch by governments actually were able to initiate significant economic and foreign policy and social and social changes. Even in the days when we had strong centralized government, there was always a policy of accommodating the needs of specific regions and one example of this is, if you look at the articles following article 370 so almost all sort of regions of India from Sikkim to the northeast or from Maharashtra have special provisions that protect certain kinds of interests, be it about the ability of outsiders to buy land in those provinces or in places like Sikkim, the fact that Buddhist monks and nuns get special representation legislation. So, so India was never a one size fits all model and attempts to do that have have have have have led to political political challenges. One of the successes of Indian federalism, particularly in the northeast has been ways in which claims that existed around 1946 and the brushed away were later accommodated to the formation of new states and I think only recently celebrated the anniversary of the birth of several new states in the northeast. There's also been a constant move towards decentralization so this can be seen either through the panchayati reforms and amendments in the early 90s so there was a conscious effort to give the lowest tongue of governance a constitutional structure. Also through the emergence of statehood or statehood movements in what were earlier considered union galleries. So as we all know there's been some. Excuse me some recent changes in that one has to see again to what extent the earlier constitutional ideas. It's quite clear that many political parties see these transformations as as by the federal idea of India. There are several court cases in the mix that are still to decide on questions of federalism and one hopes the Supreme Court will express its opinions clearly. This remains a sort of battle of values and ideas, but then there is strong precedent and there are strong clauses in the Constitution that gives strength to those who look to have a more decentralized and a more federal India. And it's also quite clear to the extent that one one one follows commentators on economics and social change that maybe in the 50s centralized growth and centralized transformation were the tools that were needed. But it isn't it's clear that sometimes growth and social change happens better through decentralized movement and decentralized funding. And one who said these forces will also push for changes and see the centralization is more a kind of aberration in the larger trajectory of Indian decentralization than a kind of permanent uter. So, again, as my colleague on this journey I've been working on this project it's quite clear that, you know, a third of Indian territory in 1947 was governed by the sort of semi autonomous princely states. Many of whom have their own constitutions their flags. The elements of states of entity and the success of the making of India's Republic, the role played by people like Nehru VP men and Sardar Patel in sort of tying these regions together was a remarkable one. And one of the factors that allowed them to bring these regions in relatively bloodlessly was to assure them that their regional identities would be maintained. In the last few years, you know, before the new states of Rajasthan or mother British were made. There were a bunch of these states that were governed by instead of governors by large promote so leaders of the world or families as democratic politics sort of grew, they were slowly moved out. And so the process that particularly when when linguistic states were being formed that in certain places, the Indian government agreed to recognize the existence of say regional state flags or state songs. I think Kashmir is was perhaps the only territory that has own constitution that was finally sort of accepted. So the question remains as to what the impact of the last set of amendments have on the jump in Kashmir constitution it's been heard by the Supreme Court. And in many places the existence of these other forms of sovereignty say celebrating Karnataka Rajyotsava or having a separate flag or state song would be seen as a challenge to national identity, but what had worked for a long time was that it was not seen as challenges but really multiple identities that people, people had. So you could be a proud Karnataka, you know with celebrating your Rajyotsava day but you're also, this is it no disrespect to the larger symbols of India. So the Karnataka day parade, if you remember the bit that many of us liked as a children was when the state sort of came on display was also a way of sort of demonstrating the certain kind of diversity so instead of pushing a one size fits all one language one national dress. One way of being Indian, there were various performances that showed there were multiple ways of being Indian. This allowed for a certain kind of diversity, both at a kind of cultural level but also the institutional level to exist. So as in when political movements sort of engage with the state for more decentralization for new states. These are all things that are in the mix that exists to be sort of navigated. So one can imagine that when new states are being formed like Telangana or the other state movements, they could adopt sort of local local state symbols and state regions. But as long as they're allowed to choose both. Pushing one with the exclusion of the other usually leads to a kind of unsustainable conflict as we've seen in our neighboring countries in Pakistan and in Sri Lanka and those are parts that it would, you know, we have navigated so far but The second question you asked was about about youth and the relatively young age of the population and I've been thinking about this in recent years in recent times and I think, you know, I won't answer the specific question which is more to do with sort of economic modeling but there is something called institutional and cultural memories. There are generations of Indians who remember ways in which the state dealt with the sand or the state sort of showcases diversity in the 70s and 80s and 90s. So you can see the changes that took place, you know, from the late days of the Congress majorities in the 80s through the kind of coalition comes in the 90s 2000s. But we're at a time where increasingly the majority of the population would have no memory of that period. So, all that they would have seen is what would have happened over the last 15 16 years, which is. So I think that that's why it's important for multiple channels to sort of talk about the history of the Republic and not talk about it didactically there's not necessarily one definitive story that everyone has to accept. But to really think and debate about decisions taken and about how the state changed from a kind of very loose idea of nationality and sovereignty in the 40s to what it has become today, and what allowed that to become possible so to sort of go back to the early part of the Constitution, the Constitution allows for the expression of dissent, but by using the Constitution to express dissent the dissenters also become a part of of the Indian constitution, right. So, by choosing to use the Constitution, you become in some ways one with the Constitution, and if constitutional dissent gets prescribed. So actually, in many ways, a greater threat to the unity of India than expressing dissent through constitutional need.