What Ambedkar Actually Argued About Constitutional Morality and Why It Still Unsettles Us

On 4 November 1948, introducing the draft Constitution to the Constituent Assembly, B.R. Ambedkar reached for a phrase that had lain dormant in English constitutional writing since George Grote used it to describe classical Athens. Constitutional morality, Ambedkar told the Assembly, was "not a natural sentiment" but had "to be cultivated." He was not offering a compliment to Indian civilisation; he was issuing a caution about its absence. That distinction has been lost in the decades since, as the phrase has been recruited by commentators, judges and politicians of every persuasion to mean something closer to fair play or good manners in public life.

The Grote Lineage

Grote had used constitutional morality to explain why Athenian democracy did not collapse into mob rule despite the absence of many formal checks. Citizens restrained themselves not because law compelled them but because they had internalised a diffused sense of what the constitution permitted and required. Ambedkar imported this idea into a very different setting: a subcontinent with almost no experience of representative self-government, emerging from colonial rule with social hierarchies that colonial administration had often entrenched rather than dissolved. His anxiety was precise. Formal democracy, he argued, was compatible with substantial administrative or social tyranny unless citizens and functionaries alike absorbed the deeper grammar of the constitutional text, not merely its letter.

This is why Ambedkar spent so much of that same speech worrying about the "grammar of anarchy," his phrase for methods like civil disobedience that had served admirably against an illegitimate colonial state but which he thought dangerous once constitutional channels for grievance existed. The argument was not that dissent should cease. It was that a republic which had just given itself the vote, the courts and the legislature owed those institutions a chance to function before citizens reverted to methods suited to an occupying power. Many read this passage today as conservative caution from a man otherwise associated with radical social transformation. It is more accurate to read it as an argument about sequencing: build faith in institutional remedy first, because its absence is what produces the disorder that both mob rule and authoritarian retrenchment feed upon.

Morality Against Hierarchy

The most demanding part of Ambedkar's argument, and the part least quoted, concerned social hierarchy as a structural threat to constitutional morality. He observed that India was entering political democracy while remaining, in his words, a society of graded inequality — a phrase that anticipated what later scholars would call the tension between formal and substantive citizenship. Constitutional morality, on his reading, could not be sustained in a society where caste denied large sections of the population the equal standing that the constitutional text promised them on paper. This is why he insisted, against considerable resistance within the Assembly, on including directive principles, on retaining reservations as transitional instruments, and on giving the judiciary and the executive enough independence to correct legislative majorities that might otherwise entrench inequality through ordinary lawmaking.

Granville Austin, whose scholarship on the Constituent Assembly remains indispensable, called the Indian Constitution a vehicle of social revolution precisely because Ambedkar and his colleagues understood that political equality without social equality was, as Ambedkar put it, "a life of contradictions." Constitutional morality was thus never simply about restraint; it was about a positive commitment to using constitutional means to dismantle inherited hierarchy, a project necessarily slower and more contested than any single election cycle could resolve.

The Contemporary Distortion

It is worth being honest about how the phrase now circulates. Judicial opinions, notably in the Naz Foundation and later Navtej Singh Johar judgments on Section 377, and again in the Sabarimala case, have invoked constitutional morality to assert that constitutional values must sometimes override popular or majoritarian morality. This usage has real intellectual lineage in Ambedkar's speech, since he too distinguished constitutional norms from popular sentiment. But it has also drawn criticism, including from within the legal fraternity, for stretching the term into an unaccountable judicial trump card, deployed without the textual anchoring that gives constitutional interpretation its discipline. Pratap Bhanu Mehta has warned that a court which treats constitutional morality as a free-floating value risks the same overreach it accuses legislatures of, substituting judicial preference for the deliberative process the Constitution actually prescribes.

This is the strongest objection to how the concept is used today, and it deserves to be taken seriously rather than waved away. Ambedkar's own argument was addressed to citizens and to the political class as a whole, not primarily to courts adjudicating individual rights. He wanted a culture, not merely a doctrine — a citizenry that internalised restraint and fair dealing across institutions, including legislatures and executives that were, in his experience of provincial politics before independence, hardly reliable custodians of minority interest on their own. Reducing constitutional morality to a judicial instrument, however useful in individual cases, narrows an idea Ambedkar meant to be diffused through the whole body politic.

What Cultivation Requires

If constitutional morality is cultivated rather than given, as Ambedkar insisted, the question becomes what cultivates it. His own answer pointed to education, to the slow accretion of administrative practice that respects due process even when it is inconvenient, and to a political culture that treats opposition as legitimate rather than as sedition by another name. None of these can be legislated into existence; they are habits acquired through repeated institutional experience, the kind Britain had accumulated over centuries and which Ambedkar knew India had not yet had time to build.

Seven decades on, the record is mixed in ways Ambedkar might have anticipated. Elections have been held with regularity that surprised early skeptics of Indian democracy, and the judiciary has, at various moments, acted as the check he hoped it would be. But the erosion of institutional independence, the criminalisation of dissent under laws whose colonial ancestry Ambedkar himself distrusted, and the periodic invocation of majoritarian sentiment against constitutional guarantees suggest that the cultivation he called for remains incomplete. His speech was not a claim that India possessed constitutional morality; it was a wager that the republic could still acquire it, provided citizens and institutions treated the Constitution as a project requiring continuous tending rather than a settlement concluded in 1950.