On Constitutional Methods and Their Limits

Ambedkar’s warning to the Constituent Assembly is often quoted as a blanket condemnation of civil disobedience, satyagraha, and mass resistance. He said: “But where constitutional methods are open, there can be no justification for these unconstitutional methods. These methods are nothing but the Grammar of Anarchy and the sooner they are abandoned, the better for us.” Read carefully, the sentence is conditional, not absolute. Ambedkar is not saying resistance is always illegitimate, he is saying it is illegitimate when constitutional methods are open. The clause doing the real work is the “where.” It leaves the opposite case unaddressed by design: what happens when constitutional methods are closed, captured, or rendered meaningless by those who control them?

It’s worth being honest about how far Ambedkar himself was willing to go with this logic, though. His concept of “constitutional morality” borrowed from the historian George Grote went further than merely preferring lawful process over unlawful process. He held that even peaceful satyagraha, civil disobedience aimed at no violence at all, was itself a negation of constitutional morality once a constitution existed. So this isn’t a case of Ambedkar drawing a line only at violent methods; he was suspicious of extra-constitutional pressure of any kind, once constitutional channels existed. That makes the “where constitutional methods are open” clause even more load-bearing, it’s the entire hinge on which his tolerance for dissent turns.

This is where the argument needs a second Ambedkar  the one who, in the same set of remarks, quoted Jefferson on the limits of any generation’s authority over those that follow it: “We may consider each generation as a distinct nation, with a right, by the will of the majority, to bind themselves, but none to bind the succeeding generation, more than the inhabitants of another country.” A constitution is not a suicide pact handed down in perpetuity; it is the settlement one generation reaches with itself. If a later generation finds that the mechanisms meant to keep government answerable to the people have been hollowed out, the Jeffersonian logic Ambedkar himself invoked suggests they are not bound to treat that settlement as sacred beyond argument, debate, and if constitutional channels are genuinely foreclosed, resistance.

Ambedkar’s own account of constitutional morality actually supplies a second test for exactly this question. Quoting Grote, he described it as reverence for constitutional forms combined with “the habit of open speech” and “unrestrained censure” of those in authority a reciprocal arrangement in which citizens defer to process only because those in power submit to open criticism and legal constraint in return. Constitutional morality was never meant to be one-directional deference. It presumes an authority that stays inside its own forms. Where that presumption breaks down  where the forms are followed on paper while power operates outside them in substance. Ambedkar’s own definition stops requiring the citizen’s side of the bargain.

Ambedkar did not leave the question of “what if constitutional methods fail” to inference alone. He spent much of the same speech warning about exactly this possibility, and squarely on the citizenry’s shoulders: “By independence, we have lost the excuse of blaming the British for anything going wrong. If hereafter things go wrong, we will have nobody to blame except ourselves. There is great danger of things going wrong. Times are fast changing. People including our own are being moved by new ideologies. They are getting tired of Government by the people. They are prepared to have Governments for the people and are indifferent whether it is Government of the people and by the people.” That is Ambedkar’s real anxiety not that people might resist, but that people might stop caring whether they govern themselves at all, so long as they are governed adequately. He goes on: “If we wish to preserve the Constitution in which we have sought to enshrine the principle of Government of the people, for the people and by the people, let us resolve not to be tardy in the recognition of the evils that lie across our path and which induce people to prefer Government for the people to Government by the people, nor to be weak in our initiative to remove them.”

There’s a live, contemporary version of this concern in circulation right now, worth noting briefly: my recent essay argues that Indian constitutional democracy has developed a structural blind spot, the state can enact an arbitrary policy, a citizen can spend years fighting it through the courts, and even after winning, the human cost of that ordeal (lost years, lost careers, chronic psychological strain) goes uncompensated and therefore unrecognized as a real constitutional injury. The essay’s proposed fix is institutional, not extra-constitutional, courts using psychological experts to quantify harm and attach real cost to arbitrary state action but the diagnosis is the same one lurking behind the question. A “constitutional method” that technically exists but takes a decade, bankrupts you, and leaves the state facing no consequence for having been wrong is open in name only. Ambedkar’s framework doesn’t have a clean answer for that grey zone, a door that’s ajar rather than fully open or shut and that grey zone is exactly where most real political frustration actually lives.

Put together, these passages don’t hand anyone a simple slogan. Ambedkar’s caution against the “Grammar of Anarchy” was real and was aimed at a specific moment a fragile new republic whose institutions needed to be given a chance to work, and whose citizens he wanted disciplined enough to use the forms they’d just built rather than abandon them at the first friction. But he paired that caution with an equally serious warning: that constitutional government survives only if citizens stay vigilant about the “evils” that erode it, that constitutional morality is a two-way obligation and not blind deference, and that no generation owns the final word on how the next one should be governed. The honest reading isn’t “resistance is always illegitimate” or “resistance is always justified” — it’s that the legitimacy of resistance is tied to whether the constitutional door is actually open in substance, not just in form, and that judging whether it’s open is itself a serious question, not a rhetorical trump card either side gets to declare unilaterally.