Explained : The Republic and its Missing Sovereign and Its Impact

As India marks the 76th anniversary of the Republic, the occasion invites more than ceremonial reflection. It demands a return to a foundational question that lies at the heart of republican self-understanding: what does it mean to live in a republic? The answer cannot be exhausted by the absence of monarchy or the regular conduct of elections. A republic, in its classical and modern sense, rests on the principle that sovereignty resides with the people, and that political authority is exercised through institutions that enable participation, deliberation, and accountability. When sovereignty is acknowledged only at the moment of voting and suspended thereafter, the republic survives in form but weakens in substance.

Recent experience suggests that this gap between republican promise and political reality is widening. Decisions of far-reaching consequence – from the farm laws and labour codes to changes in environmental regulation, education policy, and labour protections – have frequently been initiated by the executive and pushed through Parliament with limited debate and little institutional consultation.

Parliamentary committees, supposed to be a space for scrutiny and public input, are increasingly bypassed, while delegated legislation and rule-making shift substantive decisions away from the legislature altogether. Even when large sections of citizens mobilise, as farmers, workers, students, or environmental groups have done, engagement tends to occur only after prolonged protest, court intervention, or political crisis, rather than as part of routine democratic governance. Consent is sought retrospectively, dissent is framed as obstruction, and participation is displaced from institutional arenas to the streets.

Popularly, a republic is understood to mean a political order in which citizens are no longer subjects, where power flows upward from the people rather than downward from a ruler. This understanding carries with it an expectation of continuing popular influence over decision-making, not merely the right to periodically replace governments. The republican promise is not exhausted by electoral choice; it lies in the idea that citizens remain active bearers of sovereignty, capable of shaping laws, policies, and priorities.

Contemporary Indian democracy increasingly confines citizens to the role of voters alone

Yet in practice, contemporary Indian democracy increasingly confines citizens to the role of voters alone. Elections decide who occupies office, but they do little to shape how power is exercised once electoral legitimacy is secured. Sovereign authority appears to reside not with the people, but with executive institutions that operate at a distance from public reasoning. Parliament, rather than acting as a conduit for popular concerns, often functions as a site of formal approval, while substantive decisions are taken elsewhere.

This democratic erosion is closely linked to the constitutional location of sovereignty. Unlike constitutions that explicitly vest sovereignty in the people, the Indian Constitution places executive authority in the President, acting on the aid and advice of the Council of Ministers. This arrangement was explicitly clarified in the Constituent Assembly.

On November 4, 1948, B. R. Ambedkar stated unambiguously: “The President of the Indian Union will be generally bound by the advice of his Ministers. He can do nothing contrary to their advice nor can he do anything without their advice.” In the same debate, he added that “the President occupies the same position as the King under the English Constitution.”

These remarks make clear that popular sovereignty in India is indirect and mediated, exercised through institutions rather than by citizens themselves. While the framers were deeply concerned about political stability and constitutional morality, the resulting system rendered sovereignty abstract – invoked in theory but rarely exercised in practice by the people. The framers did not envision citizens directly exercising power over public affairs; sovereignty was to be managed by institutions acting in the name of the people.

This arrangement is often treated as a uniquely Indian compromise, shaped by the anxieties of Partition and the need for national unity. Yet the displacement of sovereignty from the people to institutions has a much longer history. The tension between popular sovereignty and representative government first emerged sharply in seventeenth-century Europe, during the struggle against absolutist monarchy. A brief return to that moment helps illuminate why modern republics, including India, continue to struggle with the question of who actually exercises power.

The political upheavals of the seventeenth century are frequently remembered as the birth of democracy. In reality, as power shifted away from monarchs, it did not pass into the hands of the people. It was transferred instead to new elite institutions – Parliaments, councils, and later political parties – that claimed to act in the people’s name while keeping decision-making beyond their reach. Even during the English Civil War, when Charles I was executed and royal authority shattered, sovereignty did not vest in the people.

Radical democratic forces such as the Levellers, who demanded equality, wider participation, and popular control over law-making, were marginalised once they threatened elite authority. What emerged was not popular rule, but a reorganisation of power among property-owning classes.

“The struggle against absolutism did not result in the transfer of sovereign power to the people, but in its transfer from one set of rulers to another.” ( A Power to Share, Part II, Hadial Bains)

The doctrine of “the King in Parliament” crystallised this outcome. Sovereignty was no longer located solely in the monarch, but in a composite institutional arrangement combining Crown, Lords, and Commons. This formula limited absolutism while preserving elite control. It was a historic compromise that curtailed royal power without transferring sovereignty to the people themselves. When India’s Constituent Assembly adopted a parliamentary system with a ceremonial President bound by ministerial advice, it consciously inherited this tradition. The shift from monarchy to republic altered the form of authority, but not the distance between power and the people.

This historical insight was not lost on liberal thinkers themselves. Writing on the political struggles of seventeenth-century Europe, historian G. P. Gooch warned against confusing the emergence of representative institutions with the transfer of sovereignty to the people (G. P. Gooch, Political Thought in England: From Bacon to Halifax). He said, “If the absolute State was the child and heir of the Reformation, democracy was its residuary legatee.”

The defeat of absolutism, he noted, did not inaugurate popular rule but merely reallocated power within ruling elites. The remark captures a dilemma that continues to haunt modern republics: sovereignty may be proclaimed in the name of the people, yet exercised through institutions designed to keep them at a distance.

By the Act of Settlement (1701), sovereignty in England was consolidated not in the people but in a composite authority – the Crown and Parliament. As K. B. Smellie observed, this marked the shift from rule by a king in person to the rule of the “King in Parliament (K.B. Smellie: A Hundred years of English Government)”. The House of Commons did not exercise popular sovereignty; it served to legitimise supreme power in the people’s name.

Economic inequality further compounds this democratic deficit

As Paul Hirst argues, representative democracy gives citizens the right to choose their rulers but denies them any share in power itself. Once elections are over, decision-making is monopolised by elected elites and insulated institutions. Popular participation is reduced to periodic consent, while sovereignty remains concentrated elsewhere, functioning primarily to legitimise authority rather than to democratise it (Paul Hirst: Representative Democracy and Its Limits).

Economic inequality further compounds this democratic deficit. While political equality is formally guaranteed, material inequality translates into unequal access to power, influence, and agenda-setting. Those with wealth, organisational resources, and proximity to authority shape policy; those without are largely confined to protest outside institutional frameworks. When political power becomes detached from the social and economic realities of the majority, representative institutions retain their outward form but lose their democratic substance.

India’s contemporary experience reflects this long historical arc. Parliamentary sessions increasingly reveal not merely truncated debate, but a deeper representational failure. Even when Parliament sits, substantive questions relating to employment, agrarian distress, labour rights, inflation, and access to welfare are often marginalised, while time is consumed by disruption, partisan posturing, and symbolic controversies. Elected representatives, far from acting as conveyors of popular concerns, frequently appear as participants in a managed political spectacle. Legislation becomes a procedural formality; representation itself is hollowed out.

Seventy-six years after January 26, India remains a republic in constitutional form. But the promise of popular sovereignty remains unfulfilled. The history of representative democracy – from seventeenth-century Europe to contemporary India –suggests that without institutional mechanisms that place decision-making power directly in the hands of the people, sovereignty survives only as an abstraction. The challenge before the Indian republic is therefore not merely to protect elections or defend constitutional forms, but to confront a deeper question: can a system that excludes people from power continue to call itself democratic?

Unless this gap between representation and sovereignty is addressed, the language of the republic may endure even as its democratic substance steadily recedes.

Raghavan Srinivasan is an author, political activist and President of Lok Raj Sangathan whose aim is to enlighten citizens on their electoral and political rights

This article went live on January twenty-sixth, two thousand twenty six, at forty-one minutes past eight in the morning.

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