The 2024 Lok Sabha election was a “fight to save the Constitution,” Congress leader Rahul Gandhi declared Tuesday, waving a copy of the Constitution of India that he has been wielding as his armour and ammunition during the election campaign. After all, saving the Constitution was one of the core campaign points of the Opposition.

The Congress won 99 seats, which may be revised to 100 with an independent candidate extending his support, in what is its best performance since 2009, and the INDIA coalition defied all exit polls to claim victory over 234 seats.

The Samajwadi Party won an unprecedented 37 Lok Sabha seats in UP, making it the third-largest winner. The party’s president Akhilesh Yadav also credited the win to people voting to protect the Constitution, reservation, and democracy.

What seems to have worked for the Opposition was Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s campaign slogan calling for a 400-plus mandate. They highlighted how his mandate could change the Constitution and undermine democracy.

This Constitution of India, dressed in a red and black jacket, then became the INDIA bloc’s most potent weapon, riding on the back of the arrests of prominent opposition leaders including Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and former Jharkhand CM Hemant Soren, and allegations of misuse of central agencies like the Enforcement Directorate and the Income Tax Department.

Post the results, Modi too embraced the Constitution. In a meeting of the newly-elected parliamentarians on 7 June, he bowed his head to touch the book. In just three days, both the primary players of the election sent an important signal—the Constitution is supreme.

In the country’s interest

Modi had a dream that one day Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) would rule the country with a brute 400-plus majority. However, his emphasis on a landslide majority was further contextualised with remarks by a few BJP MPs, who claimed they needed the majority to change the Constitution.

It all seems to have begun in March, when BJP MP and former Union minister Ananthkumar Hegde suggested that the ruling party would amend the Constitution after securing a two-thirds majority in the Rajya Sabha, to reverse the “unnecessary things” introduced by the Congress to “subjugate the Hindu community”.

Article 368 of the Constitution says that a bill for amendment needs to be passed by a majority of the total membership of each House and by a majority of not less than two-thirds of the members present and voting in that House, after which it needs the President’s assent. In a few cases, the amendment also requires ratification by more than 50 per cent of the state legislatures, before the President can give his assent to the bill.

The BJP was quick to distance itself from Hegde, calling it his “personal views”. He was also eventually dropped as its candidate from Uttara Kannada.

However, that didn’t stop the remarks. On 30 March, BJP’s Jyoti Mirdha spoke about the need to make Constitutional amendments “in the country’s interest”. In April, then BJP MP Lallu Singh said at a rally that the government will need a two-thirds majority in Parliament to “make a new Constitution”. His remark came on Ambedkar Jayanti.

The Samajwadi Party was quick to pick up on it, with Yadav declaring that the Lok Sabha elections were a contest between the “rakshak” (protectors) of the Constitution and its “bhakshak” (predator).

Singh lost to Samajwadi Party’s Awadhesh Prasad by 54,567 votes from Faizabad, which includes Ayodhya, the home of the newly-built Ram Mandir, which was one of BJP’s central poll planks.

Invoking Ambedkar 

Rahul Gandhi travelled with his copy of the Constitution, across the country, taking it to most election rallies that he addressed. 

In April, Gandhi wielded the Constitution, warning people against BJP’s alleged plans during an election rally in Madhya Pradesh’s Bhind district. He said that if the BJP returns to power at the Centre, it will “tear apart” and “throw away” the Constitution, which granted rights to the poor, Dalits, Scheduled Tribes and Other Backward Classes.

In May, he reassured the people during two public meetings in Telangana that the Congress, with the support of the people of the country, would protect the Constitution at any cost—once again waving a copy of it.

Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma attacked Gandhi on 18 May by claiming that the Congress leader was holding the Chinese constitution. “The original copy of the Constitution of India has a blue cover,” Sarma tweeted. Very quickly, several fact-check organisations and people on X proved the CM wrong.

Meanwhile, other Congress leaders, from party President Mallikarjun Kharge to Shashi Tharoor, also intensified the attack on the BJP and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), accusing them of undermining the Constitution.

In response, several top BJP leaders, including Modi, had to spend the rest of their campaigning clarifying that it wouldn’t touch the Constitution.

On 12 April, addressing an election rally in Barmer, Modi even invoked BR Ambedkar to reassure the masses, saying that the “Constitution can’t be abolished even by Babasaheb Bhimrao Ambedkar himself”. However, the damage seemed to have already been done.

Character arch

The Constitution has seen a formidable character arch in India, especially in the past few years.

It formally made its appearance in public view back in December 2019, springing alive from law school classrooms to the streets of the country, emerging at the focal point of the protests against the Modi government’s decision to amend the Citizenship Act and its plans for a nationwide National Registration of Citizens.

At the time, Bhim Army chief Chandrashekhar Azad raised it among a sea of protesters in the Jama Masjid. Students and citizens read it out together in front of the India Gate. And All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) leader Asaduddin Owaisi read the Preamble loud and clear to thousands in Hyderabad.

Once in the public eye, the Constitution has since refused to leave. In September 2022, when Rahul Gandhi set off to burnish his image, the Bharat Jodo Yatra was also pitched as a “journey to save democracy and the Constitution”. When in Mhow, Madhya Pradesh—which is Ambedkar’s birthplace— Gandhi “took a pledge to protect the Constitution”.

In March this year, the Constitution once again made its appearance, as the climax in Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra. He ended the yatra in Mumbai by reading the Preamble.

Azad has now been elected from Nagina Lok Sabha Constituency in UP, and Owaisi retained his Hyderabad seat. As for Gandhi and the Opposition, they seem to have found their way out of the political wilderness that they had been exiled to for about a decade now—all with the Constitution as their star campaigner.

This article was originally published at The Print.