The birth of Indian democracy is the stuff of legend. It was a moment of such staggering idealism and exuberance, a leap of faith so audacious, that the famous jurist and scholar Kenneth Wheare termed it “the biggest liberal experiment in democratic government” that the world had seen.
At its centre lay the country’s new constitution. That document, with its fabled chapter of fundamental rights, transformed in one stroke what had been the world’s largest colony into the world’s largest democracy.
Think about the origins of this constitution. It promised freedom to a fifth of humanity. It embodied the enfranchisement of the world’s largest electorate and the conversion of colonial subjects into rights-bearing citizens.
