A Country Young and Old: Nationalism and the Battle Over Constitutional Identity in India

Rupavardhini Balakrishnan Raju

Oxford University

This year marks 75 years of the Constitution of India coming into force, which – given the average life span of constitutions – is a very respectable, grand old age. Over the decades, India’s constitutional identity has become a powerful symbol in the country's political discourse, reflecting competing visions of nationalism and democracy and what it means to be Indian. However, while the Indian Constitution has shown high resilience, its constitutional identity is at a moment of significant upheaval. In this post I will highlight some of the ways in which nationalism has put Indian constitutional identity in flux.

Nationalism and Constitutional Identity

Constitutional identity can be understood as the identity of the constitution, or it can refer to the identity of a constitutional community. In the latter sense of the concept, it also stands for the self-definition, markers of identity, values, and symbols that a constitutional community draws from the constitution. Constitutional identity in both its meanings has high political salience in India. To fully understand the contest over constitutional identity, nationalism is the key register.

Nationalism is of particular significance in India at the moment because of the political dominance exerted by India’s ruling party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and its Hindu majoritarian and nationalist politics. For context, the BJP’s ideological roots lie in Hindu nationalism and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS– a Hindu nationalist volunteer organisation).  Hindutva is the political ideology that underpins Hindu nationalism, which defines Indian identity in Hindu ethno-cultural terms and aims to transform India into a Hindu nation-state.

Nationalism influences constitutional identity through attempts to render constitutional identity congruent with the nation. The straightforward way of achieving this is through explicit constitutional change. This could involve a complete constitutional overhaul, drafting a constitution which ‘privileges the members of one ethnically defined nation’ (a model known as ‘constitutional nationalism’), or other formal changes such as amendment or repeal of parts of the Constitution. However, nationalism’s transformation of constitutional identity can also be achieved without explicit constitutional change.

Constitutional Identity and Change: Two Methods

1. Explicit Constitutional Change

Time and again a vision of constitutional nationalism creating an ethno-religious Hindu state has been put forward by various Hindu nationalist groups. For instance, in January 2025 a group of academic post holders announced a draft of a constitution for an ‘Akhand Hindu Rashtra’ (Undivided Hindu Nation), which it plans to submit to the Central Government. However, such attempts usually have no serious political backers and are dismissed as demands from the far fringes of nationalism. The BJP and RSS have been careful to affirm their allegiance to the Indian Constitution in recent years.

Political parties in general have had to tread cautiously while criticising the Indian Constitution or proposing changes. There are many reasons for this, such as its perceived legitimacy in the public sphere, the political pushback that criticism attracts, and – to use legal historian Rohit De’s words – its ‘centrality to public and private lives’ in India. While the Indian Constitution and constitutional practice are not without critics and the Constitution has been frequently amended, the prospect of radical constitutional change is nonetheless controversial.

During the 2024 Parliamentary elections the Constitution became an election issue. The major opposition party, Indian National Congress, made ‘defending the Constitution’ a part of their election manifesto. The narrative that the Constitution must be saved was also used in the campaigns of other opposition parties. These campaigns gathered momentum on the back of the BJP's election slogan asking the public for a supermajority. A supermajority would allow the government to amend or repeal deeply entrenched provisions in the Indian Constitution fundamentally altering its constitutional identity. This stoked fears of significant constitutional change including the removal of the provisions for reservations (affirmative action quotas based on  caste, tribal, minority, and gender status).

While the actual impact of the 'saving the Constitution' narrative on voter behaviour remains a question for psephologists to answer, the election results denying the ruling party a supermajority were seen by many commentators as a victory for constitutional values. Sweeping constitutional change does not appear to be on the immediate agenda.

2. Change through the Reframing of Constitutional Meaning

It is noteworthy however, that the rise in authoritarianism and democratic decline in India has been marked by the progressive weakening of its constitutional institutions and not so much by drastic or explicit constitutional change. Tarun Khaitan in his piece ‘Killing a Constitution with a Thousand Cuts’ elaborates on the ways that the Indian Constitution has been undermined through ‘multiple, small-scale, incremental assaults’. It is the subtler forms of change that arguably have greater consequences for Indian constitutional identity.

Constitutional identity can also be changed through constitutional interpretation, changing conventions, shifts in constitutional ideology and public discourse. These changes, often incremental, cumulatively reframe constitutional meaning.

Some broad lines of argument deployed by Hindu nationalists and other political actors to critique the Constitution is that it is infused with Western values, not adequately representative of ‘Indian values’, and that it is colonial. The inherent assumption in these arguments is often the conflation of Indianness with Hinduness. The Indian courts have also at times given in to this tendency. For instance, appealing for votes on the ground of religion is prohibited under India’s election laws. However, as scholars writing on secularism have pointed out, the Indian Supreme Court’s rulings conflating ‘Hindutva’ with an Indian ‘way of life’, ‘culture’ and ‘heritage’ secularised the ideology of Hindutva and rendered its use in election campaigns lawful. This paved the way for politics aligning with Hindu nationalism and made the use of Hindutva rhetoric in public discourse acceptable without appearing in violation of the constitutional value of secularism. This marks a shift in constitutional ideology, which Nick Barber describes as setting ‘the boundaries of acceptable debate within the constitutional order.’ While secularism is part of the basic structure of the Indian Constitution and is immune from removal through amendment, its meaning has been reframed and a change in constitutional identity has been effected.

Other constitutional terms such as ‘democracy’ and ‘republic’ are equally susceptible to such reframing. The increasing attacks on the Constitution using the language of decoloniality set the stage for a constitutional 'switcheroo' where the terms remain but their meanings are replaced by a supposedly authentic ‘Indian’ version of the concept. The catch here is that  'Indianness' is rendered synonymous with Hindutva by the forces of Hindu nationalism, and the colonial period expanded to include the medieval period when Muslim rulers gained ascendancy. If constitutional terms are unmoored from the constitutional institutions and rights that underpin them, and religious and cultural pasts become the source of interpretation, constitutional meaning can eventually become aligned with majoritarian constitutional nationalism. This risks negating the transformative impetus of the Indian Constitution.

Such shifts in meaning and ideology have consequences for the continuous renegotiation of what it means to be an Indian. For example, in the demonstrations against the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019, an Act criticised as being exclusionary, and foregrounding an ethno-religious nationalist vision of Indian identity, the protestors chanted from the preamble of the Constitution. A significant part of the public discourse and imagination drew support from the Constitution for an idea of India that is secular, inclusive, and plural to argue against the 2019 Act. The contest over constitutional identity in this sense is between an inclusive vision of the Indian constitutional community as opposed to an exclusionary Hindu majoritarian version. With the reframing of constitutional meaning, the capacity of Indian constitutional identity to accommodate minority identities would be lost.

Thus, given the salience of constitutional identity to the character of Indian democracy, it is important for scholars and practitioners of the Indian Constitution to pay closer attention to interaction between nationalism and constitutional identity. Otherwise, with enough changes to constitutional identity, the Indian Constitution as a text will endure like Theseus’ ship, but – in the service of majoritarian nationalism – become incapable of carrying along all of India’s constitutional community.

Rupavardhini Balakrishnan Raju is a DPhil Candidate at Oxford University, and a Lecturer in Law at Trinity College, Oxford University.

The artwork in the post is reproduced with permission from and thanks to Sanitary Panels at https://x.com/sanitarypanels

Suggested citation: Rupavardhini Balakrishnan Raju, 'A Country Young and Old: Nationalism and the Battle Over Constitutional Identity in India' IACL-AIDC Blog (11 February 2025) A Country Young and Old: Nationalism and the Battle Over Constitutional Identity in India — IACL-IADC Blog