New Delhi: Abraham Lincoln's formulation, though not Indian in origin, has long been invoked in Indian constitutional discourse as shorthand for the republican promise embedded in the Preamble, a government that draws its authority from the people, exercises it through the people's representatives, and remains answerable to the people it governs. That promise is presently under considerable strain. Across a cluster of recent events, from the collapse of the NEET UG 2026 examination to the ethnic conflagration in Manipur, from tribal displacement over the Ken-Betwa river-linking project in Madhya Pradesh to the ecological cost of the Great Nicobar Island project, from the abrupt rollout of twenty percent ethanol blended petrol to the continuing distress reflected in farmer and student suicides, a pattern emerges of executive action proceeding with insufficient regard for procedural fairness, consultation and constitutional accountability. This piece examines that pattern through the lens of constitutional law and the debates that shaped the founding document itself.
What the Constituent Assembly Foresaw
The framers of the Constitution were acutely conscious that a democratic text, however carefully drafted, could be hollowed out by the manner of its implementation. Dr B.R. Ambedkar, in his closing address to the Constituent Assembly on November 25, 1949, cautioned that a good Constitution could still turn out badly if those entrusted with working it failed to observe what he termed constitutional morality, a disciplined adherence to constitutional methods and process rather than to methods of civil disobedience or executive fiat once in power. He also warned against India abandoning constitutional methods of achieving social and economic objectives in favour of what he called the grammar of anarchy, and cautioned equally against allowing the accumulation of power in a manner that reduced democracy to a mere façade, whatever the electoral mandate behind it.
Other members of the Assembly echoed this concern for restrained, accountable exercise of power. K.M. Munshi and Alladi Krishnaswami Ayyar, during the debates on the Directive Principles and the structure of executive power, repeatedly stressed that governance under the new Constitution had to be exercised in trust for the people, subject to reasoned justification and openness to challenge, rather than as an unaccountable prerogative of the state. This vision finds its modern doctrinal expression in the basic structure principle laid down in Kesavananda Bharati v. State of Kerala (1973) 4 SCC 225, which held that the rule of law, judicial review and constitutionalism itself are inviolable features of India's constitutional order that no organ of government, however popularly elected, may dismantle. The point was reaffirmed in Indira Nehru Gandhi v. Raj Narain, 1975 Supp SCC 1, where the Court held that free and fair elections and the rule of law are basic features of the Constitution, binding even upon the highest offices of the state.
The NEET UG 2026 Collapse and the Erosion of Legitimate Expectation
The cancellation of the NEET UG examination held on May 3, 2026, after investigators found overlaps between a pre-circulated guess paper and the actual question paper, affected over 2.27 million aspirants nationwide, an examination scandal that led to the cancellation of the exam, a re-examination and a CBI probe. The re-conducted examination, held weeks later amid continuing anxiety over further leaks, has since produced a wave of reported student distress, with several NEET aspirants dying by suicide amid academic pressure and fear of failure, a crisis that has renewed concerns over student mental health following the cancellation. In constitutional terms, students preparing for a government-conducted examination possess a legitimate expectation of procedural integrity, an expectation rooted in the doctrine articulated in State of Punjab v. Gurdial Singh (1980) 2 SCC 471 and refined in later administrative law jurisprudence, that state action affecting large numbers of citizens must be fair, transparent and free from arbitrariness under Article 14. Where the machinery of the state itself becomes the source of the very irregularity it was meant to prevent, the breach is not merely administrative but constitutional, striking at the fairness guarantee that Article 14 exists to protect, and at the right to education and dignity under Article 21 as expounded in Unni Krishnan, J.P. v. State of Andhra Pradesh (1993) 1 SCC 645.
The Ken-Betwa Project and the Denial of Free, Prior and Informed Consent
In Madhya Pradesh's Chhatarpur and Panna districts, tribal communities have sustained a protest against the Ken-Betwa river-linking project since 2023, escalating in 2026 into symbolic funeral pyre demonstrations and prolonged water satyagrahas, with tribal women organising a Chita Andolan by lying on symbolic funeral pyres near the project site to protest displacement. The protesters allege inadequate compensation, absence of meaningful rehabilitation and a consultation process that has failed to secure their free, prior and informed consent before large-scale land acquisition, describing demolitions of homes and threats to their livelihoods and demanding fair compensation and rehabilitation. This is precisely the constitutional harm that the Supreme Court sought to prevent in Samatha v. State of Andhra Pradesh (1997) 8 SCC 191, which held that tribal land cannot be transferred for non-tribal commercial exploitation without regard to the constitutional protections extended to Scheduled Areas, and in Orissa Mining Corporation Ltd. v. Ministry of Environment and Forests (2013) 6 SCC 476, the Niyamgiri hills case, where the Court held that the religious and cultural rights of forest-dwelling communities under the Forest Rights Act, 2006 required their Gram Sabhas to be consulted and their consent genuinely sought before diversion of forest land for large infrastructure projects. A rehabilitation package announced unilaterally after protests have continued for months, without prior negotiation, sits uneasily with this constitutional requirement of consent preceding displacement rather than compensation following it.
Manipur and the State's Failure of Its Article 21 Duty
Manipur has remained in a state of intermittent ethnic violence since May 2023, with a bomb attack in Bishnupur district in April 2026 killing two children and triggering fresh rioting in which security forces opened fire on protesters, an attack that hit a civilian house and resulted in the death of two children, after which around 500 protesters attacked a nearby security camp. The persistence of this crisis, more than three years after it began, raises a squarely constitutional question of the state's positive obligation to protect life under Article 21, an obligation the Supreme Court has held extends beyond mere non-interference to an affirmative duty to prevent custodial and communal violence, as recognised in D.K. Basu v. State of West Bengal (1997) 1 SCC 416 and, in the specific context of the Northeast, in Naga People's Movement of Human Rights v. Union of India (1998) 2 SCC 109, where the Court examined the extraordinary powers available to security forces under special legislation alongside the state's continuing accountability for the protection of civilian life. Where a state government and the Union both possess extraordinary powers under Article 355 and Article 356 to restore constitutional machinery, prolonged inaction inevitably invites the question the Constituent Assembly itself debated at length, namely whether such emergency powers exist to protect federalism and public order or risk becoming, in the framers' own words of caution, instruments that could be misused to override the very democratic structure they were meant to preserve.
Great Nicobar and the Environmental Rule of Law
The Great Nicobar Island Development Project, involving the diversion of over 130 square kilometres of tropical forest land, has been criticised for environmental clearance processes that failed to make mandatory six-monthly compliance reports and conservation mitigation plans publicly available, undermining the transparency that environmental clearance conditions are meant to ensure, with compliance reports mandated under the clearance conditions not made public since March 2024 and minutes of monitoring committee meetings uploaded months after they are held. This directly implicates the precautionary principle and the doctrine of sustainable development articulated in Vellore Citizens' Welfare Forum v. Union of India (1996) 5 SCC 647, which held that environmental clearance cannot be treated as a formality and that the burden lies on the project proponent to demonstrate that an activity is environmentally benign before, not after, irreversible damage is done. It also engages the public trust doctrine recognised in M.C. Mehta v. Kamal Nath (1997) 1 SCC 388, under which natural resources held in trust for the public cannot be alienated in a manner that disregards ecological consequences or forecloses meaningful public participation guaranteed under the Environment Impact Assessment Notification, 2006, itself a delegated legislation whose procedural safeguards exist precisely to operationalise Article 21's guarantee of a healthy environment as read in Subhash Kumar v. State of Bihar (1991) 1 SCC 598.
Ethanol Blending and the Requirement of Fair Procedure
The rollout of twenty percent ethanol blended petrol across the country, years ahead of the original 2030 target, has drawn criticism for proceeding without consumers being given the option to purchase unblended fuel or adequate prior notice of the change, a policy the Supreme Court declined to interfere with when a public interest litigation challenged the rollout of E20 fuel without providing consumers an option to purchase an alternative. Even where the Court declined to intervene on merits, the underlying grievance, that a policy affecting nearly every vehicle owner in the country was implemented through administrative notification with limited public consultation, echoes the procedural fairness principle at the heart of Maneka Gandhi v. Union of India (1978) 1 SCC 248, that any executive action affecting the rights and interests of citizens must follow a procedure that is fair, just and reasonable, and not one that is arbitrary or oppressive merely because it is administratively convenient. The government's own attorney general's submission that the policy remains an ongoing experiment whose full impact will only be clear in the following year is, on this reading, an implicit admission that the procedural rigour ordinarily expected before mandating a nationwide change was not fully observed before rollout.
Livelihood, Employment and the Directive Principles
Article 41 of the Constitution directs the state to make effective provision for securing the right to work within the limits of its economic capacity, a directive principle that, while not directly enforceable, has been read by the Supreme Court in Olga Tellis v. Bombay Municipal Corporation (1985) 3 SCC 545 as informing the content of the right to livelihood under Article 21, since the deprivation of livelihood is tantamount to the deprivation of life itself. Persistent shortfalls in government job creation and recruitment, set against the backdrop of examination scandals that further delay entry into public service, compound this constitutional concern. When the very machinery meant to translate the directive principle into opportunity, competitive public examinations and recruitment drives, becomes unreliable, the state's failure operates on two constitutional registers simultaneously, frustrating both Article 41's aspirational mandate and Article 21's justiciable guarantee of a life with dignity.
Farmer and Student Suicides as a Constitutional Failure of Article 21
The continuing incidence of farmer suicides linked to agrarian distress, and student suicides linked to examination failure and academic pressure, cannot be read as isolated personal tragedies when they occur against a backdrop of state policy failure. The Supreme Court's expansive reading of Article 21 in Francis Coralie Mullin v. Administrator, Union Territory of Delhi (1981) 1 SCC 608, that the right to life includes the right to live with human dignity and all that goes along with it, including adequate means of livelihood, places an affirmative burden on the state to ensure that its policies do not themselves become a proximate cause of despair. Where agrarian policy, examination administration and employment generation each show independent signs of institutional strain, the cumulative human cost borne by farmers and students alike becomes not merely a social crisis but a measure of the distance between the Constitution's promise of a life of dignity and its administration in practice.
Constitutional Morality as the Missing Thread
What connects these otherwise disparate episodes, an examination scandal, a river-linking project, an ethnic conflict, an island development scheme, a fuel policy and a crisis of livelihood, is a common procedural deficit: the absence of genuine consultation, transparent process and accountability before the exercise of state power. Ambedkar's warning to the Constituent Assembly was precisely that the Constitution's democratic form could survive while its substance quietly eroded, if those who wielded power came to treat constitutional method as an obstacle rather than a discipline. The Supreme Court's jurisprudence across land acquisition, environmental clearance, examination administration and citizens' fundamental rights has consistently sought to hold executive power to that discipline. Whether that jurisprudence translates into a reformed practice of governance, one that engages before it acts rather than defends after the fact, will determine whether the Preamble's promise of a government of the people, by the people, for the people remains a living constitutional commitment or recedes into aspiration.
A Counterpoint the Government Would Offer
It is worth recording, in fairness, that the government has consistently defended each of these initiatives on its own terms. On ethanol blending, the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas has maintained that the policy strengthens energy security, reduces import dependence and benefits farmers, and has issued public clarifications addressing mileage concerns, stating that ethanol is not a new fuel and pointing to its century-long global use to counter claims that India rushed the transition. On Great Nicobar, the Union government has defended the project as a strategic and developmental necessity for the islands, asserting that all clearances followed due process and that opposition claims are exaggerated. On the Ken-Betwa project, authorities point to its projected benefits for drinking water access, irrigation and hydropower for millions of residents across two states, benefits the government says will resolve the long-standing water crisis in the Bundelkhand region and reduce distress migration. These competing justifications do not resolve the procedural concerns raised above, but they form a necessary part of any complete constitutional assessment of governance in the present moment.
Key Judicial Precedents Cited
Kesavananda Bharati v. State of Kerala (1973) 4 SCC 225; Indira Nehru Gandhi v. Raj Narain, 1975 Supp SCC 1; State of Punjab v. Gurdial Singh (1980) 2 SCC 471; Unni Krishnan, J.P. v. State of Andhra Pradesh (1993) 1 SCC 645; Samatha v. State of Andhra Pradesh (1997) 8 SCC 191; Orissa Mining Corporation Ltd. v. Ministry of Environment and Forests (2013) 6 SCC 476; D.K. Basu v. State of West Bengal (1997) 1 SCC 416; Naga People's Movement of Human Rights v. Union of India (1998) 2 SCC 109; Vellore Citizens' Welfare Forum v. Union of India (1996) 5 SCC 647; M.C. Mehta v. Kamal Nath (1997) 1 SCC 388; Subhash Kumar v. State of Bihar (1991) 1 SCC 598; Maneka Gandhi v. Union of India (1978) 1 SCC 248; Olga Tellis v. Bombay Municipal Corporation (1985) 3 SCC 545; Francis Coralie Mullin v. Administrator, Union Territory of Delhi (1981) 1 SCC 608
