New Year Ruminations: The Year of the Book of Hope

Even as 2024 recedes, its disappointing trail will drag on. The biggest disappointment is that in a year of many elections worldwide, people voted demagogues and autocrats into power, simply because their message of hating the other is easier to latch onto than continuous engagement with civics and civility—the price of citizenship in a democracy.

In India, the success of demagogues is accompanied with the failure of institutions meant to serve as the guardrails of democratic functioning. Nothing could match the disappointment of watching a very learned chief justice of India praying on video with the prime minister.

The separation of church and state, the wall between the executive and the judiciary dissolved into a preview of the new normal in a Hindu Rashtra. However, the Supreme Court still gave us hope when it ruled against bulldozers as a form of collective punishment.

It gave us further hope when it stayed all further effective proceedings in various local suits filed to reclaim various mosques under which ancient temples are claimed to exist. There is no one person in whom we can invest all our hopes.

It is our Constitution that will have to carry the burden of being the book of hope for all Indians. It is not just a little red book to be waved around, it is a national compact between citizens. A constitutional right denied any citizen is denial to all citizens.

Thus, when citizens react to “samvidhan khatre mein hai” (the Constitution is in danger) or to insults to Dr Ambedkar, they are rising to defend what is truly theirs. Public ownership of the Constitution and its assertion as a restraint on executive despotism must be our hope for 2025. Jai Hind!

Sanjay Hegde is a Senior Advocate practising in the Supreme Court of India