In a few days, on November 26, India will celebrate yet another Constitution Day. Earlier, this solemn occasion used to be styled National Law Day. In 2015, it got an upgrade. Now it is not only an occasion to reflect on the nation’s laws but also the nation’s Constitution, its founding document. The occasion has considerable historical basis: after all, November 26 was the date on which the Constituent Assembly had enacted the Constitution of India, bringing three years of deliberations, debate and dialogue to a close. But what does it mean to anoint a day to celebrate the Constitution, or law for that matter? Much like other ceremonial days, one hopes that beyond the pomp and the pageantry, there is an inward reflection on what the day could mean for modern India.
Any such reflection will reveal a sordid truth. Our laws are, by and large, poorly drafted, unclear, and consider verbosity and complexity as markers of gravity and authority. A majority of them are written in archaic English using words like “notwithstanding” and “whereas” which no ordinary person uses in writing or speech. Sentences are long. Full stops are scarce. Local language versions are even worse. The officialese that is used is incomprehensible to even native speakers of the language.
This is revealing — if the purpose of law is to ensure that citizens adhere to them, an effort to make citizens understand what the laws mean would be natural. But with the type of language used, it appears that law-making is an end in itself. For helping citizens understand them, it is assumed that the public-minded and noble profession of lawyers will step in.
This assumption has unravelled spectacularly as time has gone by. A combination of overly complex laws, mind-boggling processes, and a steadfast refusal to introspect has meant that lawyers have steadily lost public confidence. In an Ipsos survey from 2024, public trust in lawyers in India was equal to trust in journalists, both of which were lower than trust in taxi drivers, government employees and businessmen. Mahatma Gandhi had an inkling this might happen. “Lawyers, as a rule, advance quarrels instead of repressing them… Petty pleaders actually manufacture them,” he wrote in Hind Swaraj in 1909. It was his “firm opinion” that “lawyers have enslaved India”. Less dramatically, most of them have certainly kept ordinary Indians unaware of the laws that have been passed in their name.
Judges, keen to allay the misery of the ordinary citizen, have intermittently taken up cudgels on their behalf. Any student of law will be able to rattle off a number of public interest judgments in which judges have upheld the rights of bonded labour, undertrials, and the ordinary home buyer. But episodic sympathy is not a substitute for a broken system of justice.
Even the so-called ‘fast track courts’ fail to deliver timely justice — criminal trials in these courts take more than four years on average to reach a conclusion. Similarly, when the State acquires private land, the law requires prompt and fair compensation. Yet, in reality, land acquisition disputes languish in the courts for an average of 20 years, leaving the original owners’ children to inherit not the land but the dispute. These delays are usually not intentional. But they have a simple explanation — judges are trained in determining disputes, not administering the institution of the judiciary. The fact that despite these unacceptable delays, judges and their registrars continue to run judicial administrations and refuse to appoint professionals well-equipped to do the job is itself a breach of public faith. This is why speeches on Constitution Day on the importance of the rule of law and access to justice by judges, despite being well-intentioned, ring hollow. Celebrating Constitution Day in a country where an average
civil dispute takes at least five years to be resolved by a district court on the basis of a provision of law that neither party to the dispute likely understands is a cruel irony.
Constitution Day does not require more speeches, it demands a new framework. Decolonisation provides a useful conceptual lens for such a framework. Decolonising law can be seen in two senses — a conceptual sense which necessarily questions the nature of the sovereign State as the source of law. This rethinks the fundamental basis for knowledge production in countries subject to colonial rule, and how some older structures of thought permeate the present. That is a subject that must be left for another column.
There is a more concrete, practical sense in which decolonisation can provide a guide to thinking afresh about the law. This involves using a citizen-centric lens with which to view laws — do citizens understand the language in which law is written? Are processes of filing in courts simple? Are litigating disputes in courts in tune with cultural instincts on how quarrels are, or should be, resolved?
One way to make future Constitution Days meaningful, starting with the one next week, is to turn away from banal homilies to thinking about how the legal system can be re-thought from such a citizen-centric point of view. This may take the form of simplifying the language of law. The Government of India has started doing this with a redrafted Income Tax Act. More needs to be done to take this forward at scale. It could also involve developing simple, local language templates to draft law, steering clear of the legalese which only a few understand. Alternatives to litigation, like compulsory mediation, becoming the norm need to be explored. Most crucially, discussions on these subjects and on Constitution Day celebrations should not be limited primarily to judges and governments. Ordinary citizens in schools, colleges, offices, communities need to actively participate in making laws work for them.
There are stories from across India showing how citizens are already taking on this mantle. Bhajan groups in Maharashtra sing ‘Samvidhan Kirtans’, linking the Constitution to their daily struggles. An anti-caste rock band in Tamil Nadu composes rap songs to convey complex legal concepts. Civil society organisations go door-to-door in Kerala to ensure 100% constitutional literacy. These groups, and others like them, are doing the hard work of decolonising the law and the Constitution, making laws work for the citizen rather than the other way around. Thousands of little functions celebrating their efforts and spreading their message are what India needs on its Constitution Day.
Arghya Sengupta is Research Director, Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy. Views are personal