Demise of Liberal Constitutionalism in India

Abstract

A closer look at some of the most notable democratic breakdowns in the last few decades tells us that it’s not the military generals but the elected representatives of the people themselves who have engineered the Constitutional cataclysms. In a practice which has repeatedly been touted as dangerously deceptive, creation of authoritarian regimes through the imposition of martial law and other forms of dictatorship has been replaced by the use of subtle changes in the constitutional order to bypass the accountability measures. These subtle yet systematic changes in the Constitutional order eviscerate it’s substance behind the camouflage of managerial stratagems of reforms and development. While the Indian descent towards illiberalism has been well-documented, this work aims to fill the scholarly gap in locating the erosion of liberal Constitutional order in India from the prims of emergence of religion as a competitive order. The note has been divided into 3 parts. Part I discusses the attributes of Liberal Constitutionalism and religion while underscoring the tradeoff between the value sets of these orders. Part II of the paper analyses the treatment that the Constitutional order has meted out to the religion in India to catalogue the reasons for emergence of the Religion as a successful competing order (to liberal constitutionalism). In the Part III of the paper, I discuss the emergence and working of the Religious Constitutionalism in India and it’s prospective impact on the Indian Constitutional Scheme