Indian constitutionalism is having a moment. In the wake of the Lok Sabha elections, mainstream politics has found a renewed enthusiasm for the Constitution. Rahul Gandhi, the new leader of opposition, was seen brandishing a pocket-sized copy of the document at his campaign rallies and carried it to Parliament. As new MPs took oath, several members of the Opposition INDIA coalition took copies of the Constitution to the ceremony.

The Constitution played a pivotal role in the Lok Sabha elections held in May-June. Some commentators even called it “the hero of the election” and the “star campaigner”. After the impression was created that the Bharatiya Janata Party might alter the Constitution and possibly remove reservation if it won a majority, many voted with the aim of protecting the promises the document contains.

This championing of the Constitution by mainstream politics is evidence of a significant chapter in the story of the document. It indicates that Indian constitutionalism is gaining an identity distinct from what was imposed upon it by its courts.

Constitutions work not just through the text of the document but through its culture too. The Indian Constitution aimed to kindle a social revolution. The method to realise this cultural change was not envisaged as being limited to the courts.

BR Ambedkar, the architect of the document, too, envisaged that the Constitution would not just be consumed but also produced by the collaboration and participation of various actors in the country’s democracy, say the authors of The Oxford Handbook on the Indian Constitution.

But despite the intentions of its authors, courts have had monopoly over Indian constitutionalism. Law professor Anuj Bhuwania in Courting the People notes that in the 1970s, the Supreme Court started deploying the language of “suffering” and “agony” under a radical new tool: the public interest litigation. Through public interest litigations, the Supreme Court loosened procedural constraints and allowed itself to take up issues of public interest, of its own accord. This allowed the Supreme Court, and by extension, the Indian judiciary, to place itself centrally in the democratic imagination of the country as a saviour.

In 1973, in the Keshavananda Bharati case, the Supreme Court was deciding on the limitations of the powers of Parliament to amend the Constitution. In a seven-six decision, the Supreme Court arrogated to itself the power to adjudicate on the validity of constitutional amendments, thus placing itself above the legislature. In effect, the court birthed a jurisprudence that made the judiciary the arbiter of constitutional imagination.

This has led to a constitutional order where the court validates the exercise of democratic power in India. Legal scholar Upendra Baxi has described this as a regime of “adjudicatory surveillance”, where the imagery of democracy and constitutionalism in India is animated primarily through its courts.

This is not to suggest that the Constitution has not had a presence outside of petitions and courtrooms in India. The Constitution has had widespread dissemination in public imagination, visible from the litigations by ordinary citizens in the early years of Independence, unafraid in taking the new state to court, says legal scholar Rohit De in A People’s Constitution.

The Constitution has also played a pivotal role in the imagination of subaltern politics, especially visible in Jharkhand’s Pathalgadi movement, where Adivasis inscribed provisions of the Constitution on stone plaques in their villages as a form of protest.

But this popular engagement has never been fully allowed to have the kind of transformative effect that the framers of the Constitution envisaged. One of the key reasons is that constitutional politics is envisaged as a legal struggle.

As it stands, the political impact of the Constitution is subject to, and circumscribed by, what the court orders in the petitions placed before it. This limits the liberating potential of the document to its text and the institutional limitations of the court while excluding any other vision of emancipatory politics.

It is in this context that the Constitution’s appearance and adoption at the front and centre of the general elections, a historic democratic exercise, marks a potential lease of life for its political prospects. The long-term possibilities of this moment rest in the hands of political actors and their willingness to harness this but some short-term effects are significant.

For one, the tilt into popular politics generates a safeguard for the text of the Constitution against any potential extremist change. As allegations of “tampering” and “changing” the Constitution were recognised as a political possibility, the invocation of the document in popular mobilisation has imposed a political price on any such possibility: any potential amendment to the Constitution now runs the risk of costing votes, over and above any possible judicial invalidation.

The Bharatiya Janata Party has had to make official, public clarifications distancing itself from statements by members about amending the Constitution. It is, essentially, the precise dilemma of the Keshavananda Bharati case unfolding in the political sphere.

In a nod to political constitutionalism, the popular reclamation of the Constitution offers a bulwark against amendments. This offers a different imagination of India where the anxieties of the Keshavananda Bharati court – of losing the identity of the Constitution through wholesale amendments – are answered in the political sphere and not in the courtroom.

In the last decade, as a by-product of the fact that the Constitution primarily speaks through its courts, the discontent with the performance of the court – in the face of fading accountability of democratic institutions – has weakened constitutionalism.

The political adoption of the Constitution decouples the legitimacy of the court from the Constitution. The effects of this moment will take time to unfold but it is possible that the court will now find itself liberated from grandiose constitutional duties and go back to performing its limited, but invaluable, role of keeping government excesses in check.

Sreeram VG is Advocate, High Court at Bombay.