Re-invigorating the Constitution through people’ struggle: Achieving Economic, Social and Political Justice is a Constitutional Imperative
By PUCL Bulletin Editorial Board
The end of 2025 provides a vantage point to see how far we are from achieving the Preambular vision of becoming a sovereign, socialist, secular democratic Republic having secured for its citizens Justice – Social, Economic and Political as also Dignity, Liberty, Equality and Fraternity. Even as we grapple with the numerous challenges that threatens the very foundation of our democratic system, our thoughts go back to the concluding speech of Ambedkar at the Constituent Assembly on 29th November, 1949, when with remarkable prescience he warned that ,‘On the 26th of January 1950, we are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality. In politics we will be recognizing the principle of one man one vote and one vote one value. In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man one value.’ He gestured to the unsustainability of this contradiction and the important task of resolving this contradiction as, if we did not, ‘those who suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of political democracy which this Assembly has so laboriously built up.’
India of 2025 is very far from resolving the contradictions that Ambedkar referred to. If one looks at the state of democracy in India today, it is hard not to notice that all the three pillars of constitutional democracy as envisaged by our Constitution Makers – political, economic and social democracy have been intentionally attacked and subverted leaving them lifeless and limp.
The Modi-led BJP-NDA government has with great precision undermined the system of free and fair elections critical to electoral democracy through a twin-pronged process. In the first stage they demolished the independence of the Election Commission by appointing Election Commissioners who operate like extensions of the ruling Government. Having achieved this, they have brought structural changes in the election system by pushing through the Special Intensive Revision (SIR). The initial laboratory was during the 2025 state elections in Bihar, when the SIR process was suddenly introduced just a few months before the state Assembly elections. In an inversion of the constitutional principle that it was the responsibility of the State to enrol all eligible voters, the SIR now required every voter to reapply for his or her right to vote. This became a process of mass disenfranchisement without precedent in Indian history leading to the deletion of 65 lakh voters from the electoral rolls.
It is no coincidence that Muslims, Dalits and migrant labour were disproportionately affected by the SIR process. It is also no coincidence that on the backs of this mass disenfranchisement the NDA won the Bihar election handsomely, even as the opposition continued to accuse the NDA of vote chori. With Bihar behind it, the SIR process has been rolled out in 9 other states and 3 union territories, of which in 3 opposition ruled states – West Bengal, Kerala and Tamil Nadu – fresh Assembly elections are scheduled in 2026. The ominous signs of mass disenfranchisement is already visible with 97 lakh voters removed from the voters list in Tamil Nadu.
The unfortunate consequence of the Supreme Court striking down the election donation laws without directing the return of the donation money by the political parties, meant that the ruling BJP party, the biggest beneficiary, could retain the huge cache of money collected by it, before the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, to be used for election purposes. With such a huge war chest to spend on elections, it is not surprising that the BJP returned to power.
The BJP is the single largest recipient of political donations having received Rs. 6,088 crores in 2024-25, up from Rs. 3,967 crores in 2023-24. It is striking that the BJP received 12 times more donations than the Indian National Congress which reportedly received donations to the tune of Rs. 522.13 crores. Most other political parties have seen a decline in the amount of donations received in the last year. A moot question is as to how much of the donations received by the BJP has been used for elections. As media reports indicate, the Election Commission website doesn’t contain the Audit Report of the BJP whereas the Congress Audit Report of election expenditure is available for public scrutiny. In effect, the BJP has ensured that there is no level playing field amongst political parties in the electoral arena, given the massive money chest at its command and the willingness of institutions mandated to oversee their functioning to close their eyes to flagrant violation of laws.
Capping this attack on political democracy is the looming threat of electoral delimitation scheduled to be rolled out in 2026. This exercise by which electoral constituencies will be redrawn based on population threatens to reduce the number of parliamentary seats in the southern states which have managed to rein in their population growth in the last 4 decades in contrast to the crucial Hindi-belt states which are both more populous and also less developed. In effect, the southern states, with a long history of social justice programming and better governance are going to pay the political price with less number of constituencies in the 2029 elections, if delimitation goes through.
There is no doubt that the ruling BJP-led government has effectively used multiple means to brazenly tear down the crucial pillar of electoral democracy in India which in 1949 promised to all adult citizens, universal franchise.. The actions of the ECI have made increasingly untenable the proud claim that India is the world’s largest democracy.
Not content to render asunder the key pillar of political democracy in India, the Modi-led NDA government has just in the last few months demonstrated that its agenda includes plans to demolish the other 2 pillars of constitutional democracy – the social and economic pillars. Using its brute majority in Parliament, the ruling party has bulldozed through Parliament new laws repealing and replacing the MGNREGA (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act) was with a new law christened the Viksit Bharat—Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin) Act, 2025.
The idea behind MGNREGA was a legal guarantee on the right to work in rural areas on demand. Studies have indicated that MGNREGA officially generated employment for 50 million rural households. Nearly half of the workers were women, and more than 40 per cent belonged to Scheduled Caste or Scheduled Tribe.
The VB-G RAM G Bill 2025 destroys the legal guarantee. The law prescribes that the right to work is no more a legal guarantee but rather something the Union government has a discretion to decide as to when and in which district the scheme will apply and which days can people avail of this benefit. The right to work under MGNREGA is today under VB-G RAM G, a scheme which applies based on the discretion of the Union Government. There are many other problems with the VB-G RAM G including centralisation of power with the Union Government, the cutting down of central funding for the operation of the right to work and the discretion vested in the Union government as to the extent of financial support they would offer the state.
Another significant weakening of social and economic democracy in India is the notification of the four labour codes, namely the Code on Wages, 2019, the Industrial Relations Code, 2020, the Code on Social Security, 2020 and the Occupational Safety, Health and Working Conditions Code, 2020 (collectively referred to as “the Labour Codes”). This has meant the repeal of all existing labour laws and its replacement by these four Codes.
The Wage Code keeps out of its fold large portions of the workforce. Gig workers are not recognised as workers; neither are the ASHA (Accredited Social Health Activists) and 2.6 million Anganwadi workers within the frame.
Under the Industrial Relations Code, if workers want to go on strike against their employer, they must serve strike notice to their employer at least fourteen days in advance. This law makes it highly difficult, if not impossible, for workers to strike. If workers do not give the notice to strike fourteen days in advance, the strike will be declared illegal.
The Occupational Safety Code becomes applicable only when ten or more workers are employed in an establishment. This code, instead of increasing the protections for migrant labour, further dilutes the existing ones by increasing the threshold for the applicability of the code from five migrant workers in an establishment, according to the Inter-State Migrant Workers Act, 1979, to ten.
The Social Security Code replaces nine laws related to social security, including Employees’ Provident Fund Act, 1952, Maternity Benefit Act, 1961, and the Unorganized Workers Social Security Act, 2008. Under the code, the Central government may notify various social security schemes for the benefit of workers. However, this code at best creates ‘enabling provisions’ for ‘progressive extension of better social security measures to the working class—it is neither guaranteed, nor can be demanded legally’.
These laws put paid to the development of a century of labour jurisprudence, opening the space to unrestrained exploitation of the worker.
The widening gap of inequality between the rich and the poor in contemporary India indicates a historical amnesia with regard to the Preambular mandate to address social and economic justice. A recent study by Thomas Piketty and others titled, ‘Income and Wealth Inequality in India, 1922-2023:The Rise of the Billionaire Raj’ confirms that inequality is the core challenge that India faces today. The study finds that, ‘Between 2014-15 and 2022-23, the rise of top-end inequality has been particularly pronounced in terms of wealth concentration. By 2022-23, top 1% income and wealth shares (22.6% and 40.1%) are at their highest historical levels and India’s top 1% income share is among the very highest in the world.’ In a troubling conclusion Piketty states that, the ‘Billionaire Raj’ headed by India’s modern bourgeoisie is now more unequal than the British Raj headed by the colonialist forces.’ He goes on to issue a warning that, ‘It is unclear how long such inequality levels can sustain without major social and political upheaval.’
The Piketty conclusion that such inequality is unsustainable and is likely to cause ‘social and political upheaval’, finds a historic pre-echo in Ambedkar’s warning that, ‘those who suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of political democracy’. Unfortunately this warning both from Ambedkar in the past and Piketty today has been ignored by the Union Government and even other organs of the state. One can only conclude that this abysmal failure to redress the unsustainable levels of income and wealth inequality and to continue with policies which increase inequality is both constitutionally untenable and dangerously short sighted.
The question of economic inequality and how addressing it should be a constitutional imperative is articulated by Justice Dhulia in a minority opinion in`Property Owners Association v State of Maharashtra’ (2023), wherein he writes that, ‘The inequality in income and wealth and the growing gap between the rich and the poor is still enormous.’ Based on this analysis, Justice Dhulia justifies the redistribution principle in Article 39(b) under which ‘material resource’ should ‘subserve the common good’.
Unfortunately the majority opinion authored by Chief Justice Chandrachud on behalf of himself and seven other judges did not endorse the policies of the state which aimed at addressing economic inequality. The majority ruling of the Supreme Court, articulates a dimension of the current neo-liberal policy consensus that property rights should not be limited by law. The other dimensions of the neo-liberal consensus includes policies like – the withdrawal of the State from welfare provisions, increasing privatisation of key sectors like insurance (100% FDI now introduced), privatisation of nuclear power plants, and the removal of liability of suppliers of atomic plant equipment in the event of power plant failures.
While Justice Dhulia’s opinion was a minority opinion, it speaks to the future of Indian democracy by again stressing that addressing social and economic inequality is both a constitutional and pragmatic imperative. The issue of social, economic and political justice needs to become an issue which animates ‘We the people’, if democracy is to survive.
In this scenario what is the role of a human rights organisation like PUCL? PUCL must continue to respond to human rights violations be it lynching, communal pogroms, caste atrocities, custodial violence or lawless violence sponsored by the state. The work of exposing the true facts underlying these violation, campaign for changes in laws and seeking accountability and justice and in making citizens more aware of their rights and protections under law must continue.
However there is a much greater task before us. In a time when electoral democracy is rendered increasingly irrelevant, the voices of civil society have the obligation to keep alive an alternative dissenting imagination. The task is that of reimagining the way our democratic system functions within the normative frame of the Preamble. One has to reinvigorate the dry words of the Constitutional text with a dissenting imagination born of struggle. It is only when the constitutional ideals of justice, liberty, equality and fraternity are owned by the people that the current scenario of increasing inequality, mass dispossession and rights violation can be effectively challenged. That task of re-imagining the ideals of the Constitution and hence re-invigorating the Constitution vests with the broader civil society.