What Ambedkar Actually Meant by Constitutional Morality, Read Past the Slogan

On 4 November 1948, introducing the draft Constitution to the Constituent Assembly, B.R. Ambedkar used a phrase that would lie relatively dormant in Indian legal discourse for over six decades before being revived with striking frequency by the Supreme Court from roughly 2014 onward. "Constitutional morality," he said, quoting the nineteenth-century British classicist George Grote's history of ancient Greece, "is not a natural sentiment. It has to be cultivated. We must realise that our people have yet to learn it." He went on to warn that democracy in India was, in his words, "only a top-dressing on an Indian soil which is essentially undemocratic," and that without deliberately cultivated constitutional morality, the forms of democratic government could survive while its substance collapsed. This is a considerably more demanding and more pessimistic claim than the way the phrase tends to be used today, where it often functions as a shorthand for "whatever value the Court wishes to prioritise over majoritarian sentiment in this particular case."

Grote's original meaning, and what Ambedkar borrowed from it

Grote coined the phrase to describe the specific civic discipline that allowed ancient Athenian democracy to function despite the absence of a written constitution enforceable by courts: citizens who disagreed strongly, even bitterly, with a decision reached through proper democratic procedure would nonetheless accept and abide by it, restraining themselves from resorting to violence or extra-constitutional means to overturn outcomes they disliked. Constitutional morality, in this original sense, was not primarily a doctrine for judges to apply against legislatures; it was a description of citizen behaviour, a habit of trusting and complying with legitimate process even when the outcome was unwelcome. Ambedkar's innovation was to import this concept into a colonial society transitioning to self-rule and warn that such habituated trust in democratic process could not be assumed to exist automatically in India, given the society's long experience of hierarchical, non-participatory governance under both indigenous feudal structures and colonial administration.

From citizen habit to judicial doctrine

The concept's contemporary judicial life began in earnest with the Delhi High Court's 2009 Naz Foundation judgment reading down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, and was subsequently invoked heavily by the Supreme Court, most notably in the 2018 judgment finally decriminalising consensual homosexual conduct under Section 377, and in the same year's Sabarimala judgment permitting women of menstruating age to enter the temple. In these rulings, constitutional morality was deployed specifically as a counterweight to popular or majoritarian morality, with the Court holding, in essence, that a practice's popularity or long social sanction cannot immunise it from constitutional scrutiny if it violates guaranteed rights such as equality and dignity. This is a legitimate and important extension of the underlying idea, but it is worth noticing that it inverts the direction of Ambedkar's original concern: where Ambedkar worried about citizens failing to respect legitimate democratic outcomes they personally disliked, the Court's contemporary usage is about judges overriding majoritarian preference in the name of constitutional values the citizenry has not necessarily internalised.

The tension this creates, honestly stated

This is not a fatal contradiction, but it is a real tension that judicial opinions invoking the phrase rarely acknowledge directly. If constitutional morality, per Ambedkar, must be "cultivated" among the population over time through the practice of democratic self-government, and Indian society has not yet, on his own telling, developed it, then a judiciary that repeatedly overrides majoritarian sentiment in the name of constitutional morality is arguably doing the opposite of cultivating that morality among citizens — it is substituting judicial judgment for the slow civic habituation that Ambedkar actually described as the necessary long-term project. The counter-argument, made by scholars including those broadly sympathetic to the judgments in question, is that fundamental rights exist precisely to be protected from majoritarian preference regardless of whether that preference reflects a mature or immature constitutional morality, and that waiting for cultivated public consensus before protecting a minority's dignity would leave rights permanently hostage to prejudice that may never fully dissipate on its own. Both positions capture something real about the tradeoff embedded in judicial review of majoritarian outcomes; neither fully resolves it.

The part of the 1948 speech almost never quoted

What gets left out of most citations of Ambedkar's speech is the passage immediately following his invocation of Grote, in which he turned to a warning about a different danger entirely: the risk that Indians, accustomed to what he called "Bhakti" or hero-worship in political life, would place their trust in individual leaders rather than in constitutional institutions and processes themselves, a tendency he described as "a sure road to degradation and to eventual dictatorship." This part of the speech is arguably more relevant to contemporary Indian politics than the more frequently quoted line about morality needing cultivation, because it identifies a specific failure mode — the substitution of personal loyalty to a leader for institutional loyalty to process — that recurs across the political spectrum in India regardless of which party is in power, and that constitutional morality, properly understood as Ambedkar meant it, was explicitly meant to guard against.

What cultivated constitutional morality would actually look like

If Ambedkar's fuller argument is taken seriously rather than reduced to a single quotable sentence, cultivating constitutional morality is not primarily a judicial project at all; it is a project of civic and institutional habituation that would show up as things like political parties routinely accepting electoral defeat without contesting legitimate results, oppositions respecting the outcomes of parliamentary votes even when procedurally aggressive, state institutions like the Election Commission and central investigative agencies being seen and treated as neutral by whichever party is out of power, and citizens broadly extending the same procedural fairness to opponents that they would demand for themselves. Measured against that fuller standard, India's record since 1948 is decidedly mixed, and it is mixed across governments of very different ideological character, which suggests the deficit Ambedkar identified was never primarily about any one party's conduct but about a civic habit that every generation of India's political class has under-invested in relative to the urgency with which Ambedkar described it.

A demanding standard, not a rhetorical trophy

The danger in how "constitutional morality" is used today is not that courts invoke it too often in defence of rights — that use, whatever tensions it carries, is defensible on its own terms. The danger is that the phrase has become detachable from Ambedkar's actual argument, cited as though it were self-evidently a settled doctrine rather than a demanding, unfinished civic project he explicitly warned Indians had not yet completed. Read in full, the 1948 speech is less a resource judges can simply cite to settle a case and more an indictment, aimed at every institution and citizen since, of how much slower that cultivation has proceeded than the urgency of his warning implied.