The Original Sin? How the First Amendment Reshaped Indian Democracy
June 18, 2026, will mark 75 years since Rajendra Prasad gave his reluctant assent to the First Amendment — a “seismic shift” in India’s constitutional architecture, the aftermath of which the country’s pre-eminent legal scholar Upendra Baxi labelled the “Second Constitution”. Few seemed to have recalled the grim events of 1951, but it was a moment that continues to course through the nation’s body politic, and one that has had profound and deleterious effects on its democracy and constitutional order. On January 26, 1950, the Republic of India, described by the Oxford don Kenneth Wheare as the world’s greatest experiment in democratic government, was inaugurated to great acclaim. Many had considered it an impossibility: Clement Attlee had even cautioned Jawaharlal Nehru against it, calling republicanism of the kind India was contemplating an alien import from Europe. At the heart of this transition lay the country’s new constitution, containing what The New York Times approvingly termed “the most detailed document of fundamental rights found anywhere,” widely seen to reflect India turning the page on its colonial …
