Core features I

The Constitution's philosophy resists a single label: it is liberal, democratic, egalitarian, secular and federal, open to community values, sensitive to minorities and historically disadvantaged groups, and committed to a common national identity. Underneath is a clear emphasis on peaceful and democratic means. In the book's image, all these ideas play on one field, and democracy is the umpire.

1. Individual freedom. This came from more than a century of struggle, not calm discussion around a table.

• Early in the nineteenth century, Rammohan Roy protested against British limits on the freedom of the press: a state that responds to people's needs must let them communicate those needs.
• The national movement fiercely opposed the Rowlatt Act, which denied freedom from arbitrary arrest.
• For over forty years before 1950, every major resolution and report of the national movement treated individual rights as non-negotiable. So the Constitution has a strong liberal character.

2. Social justice. Indian liberalism differs from classical western liberalism, which puts individual rights above social justice and community values. Here liberalism was always linked to social justice: equal rights alone could not undo age-old injustice, so the Constitution provided reservation of seats in legislatures for Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, and allowed reservation of public jobs.

3. Respect for diversity and minority rights. Communities in India were often unequal (as with caste) or rivals (as with religious communities). Not recognising communities at all, as many western constitutions do, would not have worked in a land of many linguistic and religious communities, where no one community should dominate. So the Constitution grants community rights, such as the right of religious communities to set up and run educational institutions, which may receive government aid.

4. Secularism. The term was added to the Preamble later, but the Constitution was always secular. The western idea is mutual exclusion: the state neither helps nor hinders religion, keeping at arm's length to protect individual freedom. India departed from this in two ways:

• Rights of religious groups: equality between communities matters, because a person's freedom and self-respect depend on the status of their community. Freedom of religion here belongs to individuals and communities.
• State's power of intervention: practices such as untouchability were so deep-rooted that only active state action could end them. The state may also help communities, for example by aiding their schools.
• The result is principled distance: the state keeps a distance from all religions so it can intervene or stay out, whichever better promotes liberty, equality and social justice.

These features are also achievements: liberal individualism in a society often unfriendly to it; social justice without giving up liberty (India entrenched affirmative action almost two decades before the US began such programmes after its 1964 Civil Rights Act); and group rights, decades before 'multiculturalism' became a common word.

Example (new): a government that funds a science laboratory in a school run by a linguistic minority, while also enforcing its laws on child labour inside that community's workshops, is both helping and checking: it chooses whichever serves freedom and equality.