We Know Our Rights By Heart. Do We Know Our Duties?

We Know Our Rights By Heart. Do We Know Our Duties?

A few months ago, a video of a man refusing to stand for the national anthem in a cinema hall went viral, followed by the now-familiar cycle: outrage, op-eds, a few arrests, and, within a week, silence. Around the same time, in the same news cycle, another story got a fraction of the attention — a municipal survey found that a majority of respondents in several Indian cities admitted to routinely littering public spaces, dodging civic taxes they knew they owed, or ignoring queue discipline "when no one was watching." Nobody organised a protest about that one. Nobody made a reel.

That contrast says something about us. Ask any Indian to name a Fundamental Right, and most will manage at least two or three — equality, freedom of speech, the right to life. Ask the same person to name a Fundamental Duty, and the silence tends to be longer. This isn't a trivia gap. It's a symptom of how lopsided our relationship with the Constitution has become, quick to demand, slow to deliver.

A Constitution Built With Two Halves, But We Only Read One

The Constitution gives us both halves of this contract, and it does so deliberately. Part III (Articles 12-35) lays out our Fundamental Rights — enforceable in court, backed by the full weight of the judiciary, and rightly celebrated as the backbone of Indian democracy. Part IV-A, added through the 42nd Amendment in 1976, gives us 11 Fundamental Duties. Among them: respect the Constitution and its ideals, defend the country, promote harmony among all citizens, preserve our composite culture, develop scientific temper, safeguard public property, and strive toward excellence in every field of individual and collective activity.

Here's the catch, and it's the hinge on which this entire debate turns: rights are justiciable. Duties are not. If your right is violated, you can walk into a courtroom and demand redress, and the state is bound to respond. If you violate your duty litter a public park, evade tax, incite communal hatred online, or simply refuse to vote no court will summon you. The Constitution asks. It doesn't compel. And that single asymmetry explains almost everything about why one half of the Constitution lives rent-free in our national consciousness while the other gathers dust in a textbook appendix.

Why We Gravitated Toward One Half

This lopsidedness isn't laziness on the part of citizens; it's structural incentive working exactly as you'd expect. A violated right is personal and immediate you feel it, and the system hands you a clear path to fight back: a petition, a lawyer, a headline. A neglected duty, by contrast, is diffuse and collective. The damage from a hundred people skipping their civic responsibilities is entirely real: potholed roads nobody reported, a river nobody stopped polluting, an election nobody bothered to vote in, but no single victim can point to a single wrongdoer and demand justice. There's no one to sue for a country's collective apathy.

Political mobilisation follows this same logic, because movements need a villain and a courtroom, not a mirror. Parties, activists, and civil society organise around rights because that's where the energy, the votes, and the headlines are. Nobody builds a movement around "we should all be developing scientific temper" or "let's collectively remember to segregate our waste." Civic education compounds the problem further; most schoolchildren across the country can recite the Preamble from memory, yet a large number couldn't list even four of the 11 duties if asked in an exam tomorrow. We have built an entire civic imagination around what we're owed, and almost none around what we owe back.

What This Imbalance Actually Costs Us

The consequence isn't abstract or merely philosophical; it shows up in the texture of daily national life. It's visible in the corruption we tolerate as long as it benefits "our side" of a political or social divide. It's visible in the environmental destruction we protest loudly about in the abstract climate change, deforestation, air quality while rarely altering our own habits of consumption, waste, or water use. It's visible in low voter turnout in some of the very constituencies loudest about their rights being ignored, as though voting were someone else's job. A democracy is meant to function as a two-way contract: the state owes citizens their rights, and citizens owe the republic their duties in return. When only one half of that contract lives in public consciousness, we end up with a citizenry fluent in grievance but out of practice in responsibility, quick to insist "the government must," rarely pausing to ask "what must I."

The Fair Counter-Argument

None of this is a call to guilt-trip citizens into silence, and it's worth being honest about the other, equally important side of this debate. The framers deliberately made Fundamental Duties non-justiciable, and they had good reason to. A state legally empowered to punish citizens for "insufficient patriotism" or "inadequate civic virtue" is a dangerous instrument in the wrong hands one that could easily be weaponised against dissenters, minorities, or inconvenient journalists, all under the comfortable guise of "enforcing duty." Keeping duties moral rather than legal was a deliberate safeguard against exactly this kind of majoritarian overreach, not a drafting oversight.

There's also a legitimate and pressing concern that "focus on your duties, not just your rights" rhetoric has been and continues to be used to silence people raising genuine grievances, telling protestors to be "more dutiful" instead of addressing what they are protesting about in the first place. Rights exist precisely because they cannot be made conditional on good behaviour; that is the entire point of a right, and no amount of duty-talk should be allowed to quietly erode that principle.

Where That Leaves Us

The answer, then, isn't to make duties legally enforceable; that road leads somewhere far more dangerous than mere civic apathy. The answer is cultural and educational. Schools could test students on the 11 duties with the same seriousness they test them on the Preamble. Civic curricula could spend as much time on "what do I owe my neighbourhood" as they do on "what can I demand from the state." Local bodies could publicly track small, measurable duty-linked outcomes: voter turnout, waste segregation compliance, tax filing rates, the way they already track grievance redressal.

None of this requires a single new law. It requires a citizenry that treats civic duty as seriously as it treats civic entitlement — not because the Constitution threatens punishment, but because a republic only survives on citizens who show up for it, not just citizens who show up to demand from it.

We built a Constitution with two halves. It's time we started reading both.

 

 

India's Parliament Is Getting Older While India Gets Younger — Why That's a Problem

 

India's Parliament Is Getting Older While India Gets Younger — Why That's a Problem

 

India is one of the youngest countries on earth. As of 2024, roughly 65-66% of Indians are under the age of 35, and the median age of the population is around 29-30 years. Yet the people making decisions for this young country are, on average, nowhere close to that age. We need more young people in politics because they tend to bring new perspectives and energy, which can challenge outdated thinking and encourage innovation. they bring fresh ideas, make politics more representative, because a significant share of the population otherwise has little voice in decisions that shape their lives, they represent large part of the population and help to make democracy more inclusive and focused on future. Youth participation also improves policy on issues that affect them directly, like education, jobs, climate and public services

 

A Widening Gap

The 18th Lok Sabha (2024) has been called the oldest parliament in India's history. Over half of its 543 MPs — 52% — are older than 55. The average age of an elected MP is 56, only a marginal dip from 59 in the previous Lok Sabha. Just 11% of MPs are 40 or younger, and only about 1 in 20 MPs is under 35 — even though nearly two out of every three Indians fall into that age bracket. Contrast this with India's very first Lok Sabha in 1951-52, when the average MP was 46.5 years old and roughly 1 in 6 MPs was under 35 — a far closer mirror of the country's own demographic makeup at the time.

This is not a minor statistical curiosity. It is the picture of a governing body that looks less and less like the population it represents, at exactly the moment India's youth population needs its aspirations, its anxieties, and its technological fluency reflected in policy.

 

Why the Age Gap Matters

The concern isn't simply that older leaders are incapable of understanding young people — many are thoughtful and stay engaged with change. The concern is structural: lived experience shapes priorities, and a parliament skewed heavily toward one generation will systematically underweight the concerns of another.

Today's under-35 Indians are the first generation to grow up entirely inside the smartphone economy, gig work, AI, and platform-based livelihoods. They face a youth unemployment rate that stood at 10.2% in 2023-24, entering a job market where a large share of graduates is considered underprepared for the work actually available. These are not abstract problems — they are the daily reality of the very demographic barely represented in the chamber shaping labour law, education policy, and technology regulation.

 

A legislature dominated by a much older cohort is less likely to intuitively grasp the urgency of these issues, or to legislate with the technical fluency needed to regulate AI, fintech, gig-work platforms, and data privacy — all areas where the underlying technology is moving faster than most lawmakers' direct experience with it.

 

The Nepotism Problem Compounds the Age Problem

Nepotism in politics creates a range of interconnected problems, both practical and democratic: The age gap is worsened by how dynastic Indian politics remains. Analysis by the Association for Democratic Reforms found that 21% of India's sitting MPs, MLAs, and MLCs come from political families — with the rate rising to 31% in the Lok Sabha specifically, meaning nearly one in three MPs inherited a family's political capital rather than building their own path from outside the system. This isn't confined to one party: research from Harvard and the University of Mannheim found dynastic representation has historically run at comparable levels across India's two largest parties, with smaller regional parties often showing even higher concentrations of family-based succession.

Dynastic entry tends to reinforce the age problem rather than fix it, since political families often groom successors within established networks and ideologies rather than opening space for genuinely new voices, technical experts, or first-generation entrants — the very people most likely to bring fresh thinking on technology, transparency, and governance reform.

 

What Younger, More Independent Parliamentarians Could Offer

Technological fluency: lawmakers who have built apps, worked in startups, or grown up online are better positioned to write laws for AI, data protection, and the digital economy — rather than legislating a world they only encounter second-hand.

Direct stake in outcomes: younger MPs will personally live with the consequences of today's decisions on climate, jobs, and debt for another 40-50 years, giving them a different relationship to long-term trade-offs than a lawmaker in their 70s.

Disruption of entrenched networks: candidates who rise on merit or grassroots support rather than family name are structurally less indebted to the patronage networks that enable corruption, since they owe less to inherited alliances and favours.

Closing the representation gap: a legislature that mirrors the country's actual age profile is likely to produce policy that reflects lived priorities rather than assumptions about what young people need.

 

The Counterargument Worth Taking Seriously

None of this means age or lineage alone determines merit, and a fair treatment of this topic has to acknowledge the other side:

Experience has real value: Legislating well requires understanding institutions, coalition-building, and the slow mechanics of governance — skills that often take years to develop, and older MPs bring institutional memory that a fully inexperienced legislature would lack.

Young and dynastic are not mutually exclusive: Many of India's youngest MPs today are themselves the children or spouses of established politicians, meaning "younger parliamentarians" alone does not automatically solve the nepotism problem — dynasties have simply started grooming successors earlier.

Some structural reforms matter more than age: Critics argue the deeper fixes are things like state funding of elections, curbing the enormous cost of campaigning (a major reason parties lean on wealthy or well-connected candidates), and strengthening intra-party democracy — reforms that could open the door to younger and non-dynastic candidates alike, regardless of any specific age target.

Technology fluency isn't strictly generational: Plenty of older policymakers work closely with technical advisors and younger staff, and legislative competence on technology depends more on institutional capacity — expert committees, research wings — than on a lawmaker's personal age.

 

The Bottom Line

The data is hard to argue with: India's parliament has grown older even as India itself has grown younger, and a meaningful share of its members owe their seats to family lineage rather than an independent political rise. Whatever the counterarguments about experience, the case for more younger, technically literate, and less dynastically-tied parliamentarians rests on a simple democratic principle — a legislature should, at minimum, resemble the country it governs closely enough to legislate its future with genuine understanding, not inherited assumption.

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Sources:

- 18th Lok Sabha data (Wikipedia, PRS Legislative Research, ADR);

- India demographic data (UN World Population Prospects, Worldometer, Economic Survey 2024);

- Dynastic politics data (Association for Democratic Reforms/National Election Watch, Harvard-Mannheim dataset via IndiaSpend/Scroll/ThePrint).