Nation vs. Citizen
Why every constitution is really a nation’s trauma response — and why India fought for freedom before it fought for rights.
Every constitution in the world is a love letter written after a heartbreak. Before we get into France, India, Germany or South Korea — sit with that one line for a second. Nobody sits down and writes a constitution on a calm Tuesday afternoon. They write it right after something has gone terribly wrong: a king who wouldn’t listen, an empire that wouldn’t leave, a genocide that shouldn’t have happened. The constitution is the scar tissue. And like all scar tissue, it grows differently depending on the wound.
This chapter starts with a simple, very human observation — the kind you might have while watching a YouTube video late at night — and follows it all the way to the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita of 2024. Along the way we will meet a magazine editor from Madras, a paramilitary group called the Brownshirts, a Nobel-adjacent philosopher’s favourite paradox, and a very tired Jawaharlal Nehru.
The Observation: Two Very Different Kinds of Freedom
The starting thought was this: Indians, as a people, don’t seem to guard their fundamental rights as fiercely as they guard the idea of national independence. We got worked up about 200 years of colonial rule far more than we get worked up about, say, an internet shutdown. Meanwhile, a country like France seems to have practically invented the modern language of individual rights — liberty, equality, fraternity — during its own revolution.
This isn’t a coincidence, and it isn’t a flaw in the Indian character either. It’s a documented pattern in political science, and it comes down to one core difference: who was the enemy?
- The French/American model — fighting the state. In 1789, the enemy was the French monarchy itself — an internal, absolute ruler. The Americans, a decade earlier, had fought their own colonial power but explicitly built a new government designed to fear itself (checks, balances, a Bill of Rights). In both cases, the entire point of the fight was to take power away from the ruler and hand it to the individual. Naturally, the resulting political culture is obsessed with keeping government power on a leash.
- The Indian model — fighting the outsider. The freedom struggle was an anti-colonial movement. The enemy was external — the British Empire. The unifying cry was Swaraj (self-rule), which is about who governs, not how much power the government should be allowed to have. When millions of people are united by “get the foreigner out,” the fine print of “and also strictly limit whoever comes after” tends to get far less attention.
Wait, Didn’t We Fight for Rights Too?
To be fair to history — and to the framers of our Constitution — it would be wrong to say Indians never cared about individual rights. The intellectual leadership of the freedom movement absolutely did.
- The Karachi Resolution, 1931. Sixteen years before independence, the Indian National Congress passed a resolution explicitly listing Fundamental Rights it wanted — freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, equality before the law, and even basic economic rights like a living wage.
- The Constitution itself. The framers, having personally lived under laws like the Rowlatt Act and the colonial Press Act, deliberately built Part III (Fundamental Rights) to protect citizens from the exact tools the British had used against them.
So the leaders cared. But the mass psychology of the movement — the emotion that got lakhs of ordinary people to march, boycott and go to jail — was built around the nation as a collective, not the citizen as an individual. That gap between elite intention and mass sentiment is what still echoes today.
The “Mai-Baap” State: Why Rights Feel Like a Favour
Because our founding emotional story is “we, the nation, suffered and rose together,” the state in India is culturally seen less like a potential tyrant to be feared, and more like a parent (Mai-Baap Sarkar) — someone who provides, protects, and occasionally has to discipline you “for your own good.”
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Compare this to the American default assumption: government is a necessary evil, watched at all times with suspicion. In India, when the state restricts a right in the name of national security, public order, or hurt sentiments, a large section of the public is far more willing to go along with it — because the state is not “the enemy,” it is “us.”
The First Amendment Irony
Here’s a delicious historical irony. Compare the two most famous “First Amendments” in the democratic world:
- The US First Amendment (1791) reads: “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” It is written as an absolute wall. Courts apply “strict scrutiny” — the government must show an overwhelming, almost undeniable necessity before it can restrict speech.
- India’s Article 19(1)(a) guarantees “freedom of speech and expression” — but Article 19(2), inserted by the First Amendment, permits “reasonable restrictions… in the interests of the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency or morality.” Same right, opposite architecture.
America’s First Amendment was built to expand liberty. India’s was built to rein it in — just fifteen months after the Constitution itself was adopted.
A World Tour of Trauma-Written Constitutions
India and France and America aren’t the only pattern. Every democracy writes its constitution as a direct reply to its own worst memory.
Germany — The “Militant Democracy”
Weimar Germany (1918–1933) had one of the most liberal constitutions on paper — and it was legally dismantled from the inside by the Nazi party using exactly those freedoms. Modern Germany’s response is Streitbare Demokratie (“combative” or militant democracy): free speech exists, but you have no right to use it to attack the democratic order itself. Holocaust denial and Nazi symbols are criminal offences, and the state can constitutionally ban political parties it deems a threat to democracy.
South Africa — The “Dignity and Healing” Democracy
Apartheid wasn’t colonialism by an outsider — it was an internal system that stripped an entire racial majority of dignity for generations. So the opening of the 1996 Constitution declares that South Africa is founded on the values of “human dignity, the achievement of equality and the advancement of human rights and freedoms.” It doesn’t just protect liberty; it enshrines dignity and equality as supreme values, explicitly refuses to protect hate speech based on race or religion, and even guarantees enforceable socio-economic rights like housing, water and healthcare.
South Korea — The “Security vs. Protest” Democracy
Democracy was won in 1987 through massive, student-led street protests against a military dictatorship — the “June Struggle.” Because of this, protest is treated as a near-sacred democratic right. But South Korea is still technically at war with North Korea, so it also maintains a strict National Security Act, which restricts speech that “praises” the North. It’s a live tug-of-war between a protest-loving culture and a permanent security anxiety.
Japan — The Pacifist Constitution
Japan’s 1947 constitution, written after its devastating defeat and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, contains the famous Article 9, which states that “the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation.” Japan’s trauma wasn’t about internal tyranny or colonialism — it was about the horror of what its own military aggression had unleashed. So its constitution restricts not individual rights, but the state’s own war-making power — a completely different kind of self-imposed limit, and proof the “trauma response” pattern isn’t only about free speech.
The Authoritarian Playbook: Weaponising Trauma
If democracies use historical trauma to build in protections, authoritarian regimes use the same trauma to justify taking rights away. The pitch changes from “never again will we be powerless” to “give me power, or it happens again.”
- China — the “Century of Humiliation.” From 1839 to 1949, China was repeatedly defeated and carved up by foreign powers. The Chinese Communist Party’s argument: only a ruthlessly strong, centralised state prevents that humiliation from returning — so Western-style rights and free speech are framed as a national security risk.
- Russia — the “Chaos of the 90s.” After the USSR’s collapse, Russia suffered hyperinflation, oligarchic asset-stripping and a collapse in global standing. Vladimir Putin repeatedly frames dissent, a free press and protest as a slide back into that chaos, trading rights for “stability.”
- Rwanda — the 1994 genocide. Post-genocide laws against “divisionism” and “genocide ideology” were meant to prevent a repeat of ethnic mass violence. In practice, they have also been used by the government to jail journalists and opposition figures who criticise it.
- Turkey — the 2016 coup attempt. After a failed military coup, President Erdoğan’s government declared a state of emergency and used it to purge and jail tens of thousands of judges, journalists, academics and civil servants — framing the crackdown as protecting democracy from an internal existential threat.
- Hungary — the 2015 migration crisis. Viktor Orbán’s government built its entire “illiberal democracy” model around the trauma narrative of an “invasion” during the European migrant crisis, using it to justify tighter control over courts, universities and the press.
Public Protest: Where the Constitution Meets the Street
A constitution is a promise on paper. A protest is the moment that promise gets tested in real time. Watching how a state reacts to a crowd tells you more about its psychology than any legal text.
The “Sacred Duty” Model — South Korea
During the 2016–17 Candlelight Revolution, millions of South Koreans protested peacefully, week after week, over a presidential corruption scandal. The state allowed it — because using force against a mass democratic protest would have violated the country’s own founding memory of 1987. The president was legally impeached soon after.
The “Public Order” Model — India
India has an enormous protest culture, but the state’s toolkit for handling it is still largely colonial: Section 163 BNSS (formerly Section 144 CrPC, banning large gatherings), internet shutdowns, and laws like the UAPA. During the 2020–21 Farmers’ Protest, all of these tools were used at different points — and yet, notably, the protest eventually succeeded: the three contested farm laws were repealed by Parliament in November 2021, showing that even within the “public order” model, sustained protest can still force a policy reversal.
The “Treason” Model — Authoritarian States
In systems like Russia or China, public protest is not treated as a domestic disagreement at all — it is framed as an existential attack, often blamed on foreign interference. There is no negotiation; the state moves straight to force, and organisers are frequently charged with subversion or terrorism rather than merely “disturbing the peace.”
1789 vs. 1947: Transfer of Power, Not Destruction of It
In France, the people didn’t just change the ruler — they tore down the machinery of absolute monarchy itself. In India, 1947 was a transfer of power, not a transformation of it. The Viceroy handed the reins to an Indian Prime Minister, but the underlying machinery — the bureaucracy, the police structure, and colonial-era laws (including the ancestor of today’s sedition and public-order provisions) — stayed largely intact. Because the fight was about who holds the steering wheel rather than redesigning the car, the post-independence Indian state remained a very powerful vehicle relative to the individual citizen.
Nation Over Citizen: The “Fathers of the Nation” Trust Trap
A civic revolution tends to distrust whoever ends up in charge — that’s the whole point of it. The Americans wrote a Bill of Rights specifically to put a leash on their own founding fathers. India did the opposite: leaders like Nehru, Patel and Ambedkar had personally suffered in British jails and were near-universally trusted. When you deeply trust your first rulers, you feel far less urgency about constitutionally restraining the ones who come after.
This “duties over rights” instinct was made official in the darkest possible way: during the 1975–77 Emergency, the 42nd Amendment (1976) added Part IV-A to the Constitution — a list of Fundamental Duties for citizens — even as press censorship and mass detentions without trial were underway. The idea of the citizen owing the nation something, rather than the nation owing the citizen protection, was, quite literally, written into law at the exact moment individual rights were being most severely curtailed.
Sedition: The Law That Never Left
Nothing illustrates this whole chapter better than one single colonial law that has outlived the empire that wrote it.
During his own 1922 trial under this very law, Mahatma Gandhi called Section 124A the “prince among the political sections of the Indian Penal Code designed to suppress the liberty of the citizen.”
Yet independent India kept the law. Here’s how it justified doing so, and how the story has continued to evolve right up to the present day.
The executive justification has always been geopolitical: a newly-partitioned, religiously and linguistically fractured subcontinent faced armed secessionist movements in the Northeast, a Maoist (“Naxalite”) insurgency, the Khalistan movement in Punjab, and militancy in Kashmir. Even Nehru, who once called Section 124A “highly objectionable and obnoxious” in Parliament, kept it — and it was his own government’s First Amendment that gave the courts the “public order” and “security of the state” language needed to preserve it a decade later.
Then, in July 2024, India replaced the colonial Indian Penal Code with the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS). The word “sedition” is gone. But Section 152 of the BNS now criminalises acts endangering the “sovereignty, unity and integrity of India” — carrying the same core power under a new name. The label changed; the underlying belief that the state needs sweeping tools to hold the nation together did not.
Coming Full Circle
So, back to the video that started all this: the observation that Indians fought fiercely for national independence but haven’t fought quite as fiercely for individual rights is not a random thought — it is a textbook (quite literally, now) case of how anti-colonial movements shape political psychology differently from civic revolutions.
We fought a 200-year war to decide who gets to rule us. The French, the Americans, and later the Germans and South Africans, fought their wars to decide how much anyone — including their own people — should be allowed to rule over an individual. Both are legitimate, historically earned instincts. But they produce very different citizens: one instinctively asks, “Is this good for the nation?” The other instinctively asks, “Is this good for me, the citizen, regardless of the nation?” Neither instinct is wrong. But knowing which one you were raised with — and why — changes how you read every headline about free speech, protest, and the law from here on.
We fought a 200-year war to decide who gets to rule us. The French, the Americans, and later the Germans and South Africans, fought their wars to decide how much anyone — including their own people — should be allowed to rule over an individual. Both are legitimate, historically earned instincts. But they produce very different citizens: one instinctively asks, “Is this good for the nation?” The other instinctively asks, “Is this good for me, the citizen, regardless of the nation?” Neither instinct is wrong. But knowing which one you were raised with — and why — changes how you read every headline about free speech, protest, and the law from here on.
