The science of our constitution
I am doing my bachelor’s in arts, majoring in psychology and there is a running joke and theory in our college that social sciences are way more difficult to study and apply in real life than pure sciences! This not just helps my ego which was conditioned to believed arts is the easiest subject but it also very scientifically explains the intricacies of dealing with humans and society.
Psychology as a subject interests me so much! It also talks about individual differences and yet is a science. Science is anything that is observable, measurable and verifiable. Psychology tries finding universal facts and laws in human beings that are all so different from one another. It’s almost unreal how it is done. At the same time so real!
We study experimental psychology and research to understand the process of how those universal laws were found. Psychology blends with other sciences such as statistics, mathematics, anthology, etc to be scientific.
When doing any scientific research, a researcher avoids taking the full population. Imagine if you were to do a study on adolescents to check their creativity and had to test every adolescent to find a pattern. We know that’s not how it works! We thus take a sample from that population and generalize the finding on the whole population keeping in mind that 5% of that population can be different too.
That sample is selected in such a way that all the characteristics of the population are present in them. Thus if India has 55% of adolescent boys and 45% of girls, the sample will have the same ratio.
This phenomenon is used by every science, even political science.
Democracy is a classic example of this theory of sampling. Democracy as an idea is a state where the people rule the country. But its not practically possible for 1.3 billion people to rule one country! Thus we have representatives.
Our constitution was made keeping in mind this phenomenon. History has witnessed countries fighting for democracy and ending up becoming dictators and military rules. Why? Because their constitution and law were not made keeping in mind all the human factors.
Thus if the representation is wrong, it can turn harmful!! Literally harmful. ( pure sciences, now dare tell me arts is easy!!)
The Indian constitution-makers were well aware of the importance of representations. Thus the lawmakers were chosen and elected in a way where every population- tribals, religions, languages, gender, minorities, etc were all represented according to its right propositions. A mini India thus made our constitution!
The reason why Hindi was not made our national language was that there were representations of south India in the assembly that understood their culture. The reason why tribals had their own provisions, reservations were made, universal right to vote was given was because the sample demanded so!
Isn’t it incredible? The power of representation?
Our constitution has survived so many conflicts because of this. There is thus, still hope in my heart that we all will survive the politics of this time too. Because our political parties and people can be bad, but the science of our Constitution and the strength it has cannot overpower any one party, group, caste, race etc.
The current political scenario is very scary. Whenever our constitution has been compromised, human lives have been compromised. whether during Indira or Modi, we have seen how it is a must for India to always. always abide by its constitution.
The constitution has always protected us, it is now our turn to protect it.
The constitution is representative, it is fair, it is the only truth we as Indians can trust.
~ Manasvi Shah