We, the Children of India

As a little girl in school, I often wondered why we celebrated Republic Day. “It was on this day that our Constitution was promulgated,” was the standard response from my teachers. At a tender age, promulgation made little sense. All I knew was that January 26 had something to do with our Constitution, a book of rules.

The most elaborate response that I had received to this query was from a science teacher who explained that the adoption of a Constitution meant that we would not be ruled by kings, queens or the British anymore. Belonging to a generation that adored the tales of valiant kings and beautiful queens, I never realised that the idea of a monarchy may not always have been a happy arrangement for all.

For children of my generation, the first introduction to the Constitution was usually through unimaginative and dull history and civics textbooks. There was barely any attempt at constructing a vocabulary for children to understand what it meant to be a Republic.

Barring a few good resources such as Leila Seth’s “We, the Children of India,” we have still not made much progress. Millions of children in our country even today have no understanding of the Constitution.

One reason could be that the Constitution continues to be imagined as a legal document, that should be read or interpreted by legal scholars and practitioners alone. Only as a grown-up when I was compelled to seriously engage with the Constitution as a student of Politics, did I come to realise the significance of this text. Even then, there was a lingering sense of trepidation, as I was not a lawyer by training.

As I grew older, the Constitution unravelled itself to me as a book of possibilities, of unfinished stories, helped put the contemporary into perspective, historicise my own identity and negotiate my perceptions of the fair and the unfair.

Why and how, may we ask, should we introduce the Constitution to young minds?

The ‘why’ is easily answered, especially in the context of contemporary times. There has seldom been a moment in India’s political history when we have been so ideologically divided as a nation. Not only are political parties at war, but people take offence at each other in everyday conversations across dining tables, classrooms, televised panel discussions, informal addas and social media. Our conversations about politics are seldom grounded in historical narratives or Constitutional understandings.

In a nation fraught with so many social and economic cleavages such as caste, class, religion and gender; we have to seriously find ways to educate our children and youth about the rationale for the provisions that exist in our Constitution and a rationale for why certain provisions did not find their way into the text. Questions about asymmetric federalism, secularism, democracy, equality and equity, affirmative action, rights and duties and citizenship could be interesting entry points to this conversation.

However, this cannot be a didactic and dry exercise in citizenship training alone; young minds have to be encouraged to read the Constitution as a political document too. As in most other countries, in India too, the Constitution is nested within the larger curricula of social sciences in schools. The idea of ‘Civics’ which preceded Political Science was conceived during the colonial period to inculcate ‘loyalty’ and ‘obedience’ amongst Indians towards the British Raj.

While the creation of a ‘citizenry consciousness’ continues to be seen as an important goal of education even in post-Independent India, the epistemological premises for constructing this have transformed quite distinctly. The National Curriculum Framework of 2005 repeatedly underlines that ‘citizenship training’ now “needs to be boldly reconceptualised in terms of the discourse of universal human rights and the approaches associated with critical pedagogy”.

It further adds that in addition to ‘developmental issues’, normative values like justice, equality and dignity should form an important part of the social science curriculum. Reading the Constitution politically allows us to not just celebrate these normative ideas but also to critically engage with how they can be realised better.

In a country as vast and diverse as ours, the Constitution is our only hope, the only glue that can bond a nation that remains defiantly opposed to the very idea of equality. Children of my generation were never introduced to songs, stories, folk tales or even books about the Constitution, simply because they never existed. The Constitution is just a 73-year-old modern story. It is time we create resources and stories to de-mystify the Constitution for our children. The classroom would be a good place to start this exercise.

(The writer teaches at Azim Premji University, Bengaluru)