Constitutional Morality vs. Social Apathy: A Critical Analysis of Rights Realization in India
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.68219/jf8pzy43Keywords:
Constitutional Morality, Social Apathy, Judicial Activism, Constitutional CultureAbstract
The Indian Constitution is a vision of democracy: it is based on rights and freedom, human dignity, justice, and individual rights. But the existence of constitutional guarantees does not guarantee success in life; we can only go so far in our life history. In this paper, we examine the conflict between constitutional morality and social apathy as two contradictory forces that play a role in the achievement of rights in India. The constitutional morality of the values, principles, and institutional commitments contained in the Constitution has come to be seen in judicial discourse to safeguard individual rights, dignity, equality of people, and minority rights in this context of the Constitution as an alternative to the dominant social system and the majoritarian values in terms of how people are governed and treated. But social apathy—indifference to human rights violations, the lack of knowledge about the Constitution, social prejudice, and the normalization of inequality, for instance—is often a fundamental disconnection between constitutional promises and actual lives. This rights-reality gap is discussed in the paper in terms of constitutional provisions, judicial developments, and some socio-legal cases where vulnerable and marginalized communities have been affected. While judicial intervention is of critical importance to the development of constitutional morality in India, courts alone cannot change the culture or the way we see rights and the dignity of others. What constitutionalism really does is to internalize the concepts of the Constitution into society, and we have to have institutional accountability, constitutional literacy, civic participation, responsive government, and a civil society. As it says in the paper, the long-term success of India’s constitutional project is not only through the enforcement of rights but also through a constitutional culture in which citizens, institutions, and social groups recognize and respect others’ rights and dignity.
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