A Policy Proposal for the Constitutional Recognition of India as a Sanatan Civilizational Republic

1.0 Introduction: The Case for Civilizational Authenticity

This policy paper advances the thesis that India’s political identity as a modern republic is philosophically misaligned and incomplete without a formal constitutional acknowledgment of its deep-rooted identity as a continuous Sanatan civilization. The prevailing narrative, which frames India as a young nation-state born in 1947, is historically thin and overlooks the millennia-old civilizational space known as Bhāratavarṣa. This proposal seeks to reconcile India’s political self-rule (Swaraj), achieved in 1947 via a dominion status, with its civilizational self-rule (Swa-Dharma)—the alignment of the state with the nation’s inherent ethos—through a deliberate and thoughtful constitutional reaffirmation.

The core claim presented here is not a demand for radical change but an argument for recognizing an existing historical, cultural, and philosophical reality: India—Bharat—was, is, and must remain a Sanatan nation. This identity is not a sectarian label but a broad civilizational canopy that has shaped the subcontinent’s values, social fabric, and worldview for millennia. To separate the state’s structural moorings from this civilizational soul is to render it rootless and susceptible to foreign ideological forms that are ill-suited to its unique history and pluralistic character.

This paper will proceed by first defining the Sanatan framework as a pluralistic civilizational ethos, distinct from narrow religion. It will then present the historical and cultural evidence for its deep antiquity and living continuity. Subsequently, it will critique the current constitutional dissonance, wherein the state’s original symbolic vision has been obscured by a later-imposed political vocabulary. Finally, it will propose a specific framework for a Dharmic Republic that not only re-authenticates the nation’s identity but also provides a more robust guarantee of equal rights and security for all citizens. This document outlines a path toward a stable, honest, and culturally confident future for India, rooted in its own deepest heritage.

2.0 The Sanatan Framework: A Pluralistic Civilizational Ethos

To understand this proposal, it is strategically critical to define “Sanatan” correctly. The term, as used in this paper, denotes a broad civilizational canopy and an enduring ethical grammar, not a narrow, dogmatic religion analogous to Western conceptions. This distinction is fundamental to appreciating the argument for a Dharmic Republic. Sanatan Dharma is best understood as a civilizational operating system—a deep script that allows multiple traditions to live, interact, and evolve under a coherent philosophical umbrella.

This framework can be understood across three interconnected dimensions:

1. As an Ontological Order: At its most profound level, Sanatan Dharma refers to the eternal, perennial principles that sustain the cosmos and society. These include ṛta (cosmic order), dharma (that which holds and sustains), and satya (truth). Governance and law, in this view, are meant to align human society with this natural and cosmic order.
2. As an Ethical Grammar: It provides a shared moral vocabulary centered on values that promote individual and collective well-being. These include core principles such as ahimsa (non-harm), nyāya (justice), seva (selfless service), dāna (generosity), karuṇā (compassion), and loka-saṃgraha (the holding together of the world for the common good).
3. As a Civilizational Ecosystem: It represents the dynamic and long-standing interplay of diverse spiritual and philosophical traditions. This ecosystem includes the Vedic traditions, the Śramaṇa schools (Buddhism and Jainism), Śaiva, Vaiṣṇava, and Śākta traditions, as well as Sikhism and countless tribal and folk practices, all of which are seen as currents within a single, vast civilizational river.

The inherent pluralism of the Sanatan framework is rooted not in political convenience but in a core philosophical principle, famously articulated in the Rigveda: “Ekam sat viprā bahudhā vadanti” (Truth is one; the wise describe it in many ways). This dictum legitimizes a multiplicity of paths to ultimate reality and fosters mutual respect between different schools of thought. This indigenous, philosophically-grounded pluralism is fundamentally distinct from the concept of political secularism, which arose from the specific European historical context of violent conflict between Church and State and was therefore designed to enforce neutrality through separation.

In summary, the Sanatan framework provides a resilient “civilizational operating system” capable of sustaining a diverse, multi-path society. It is this time-tested system, with its deep historical roots, that offers a more authentic foundation for the Indian Republic than any borrowed conceptual scaffolding.

3.0 The Imperative of Deep Time: Documenting Sanatan Civilizational Antiquity

Demonstrating the deep antiquity of Sanatan civilization is crucial to the constitutional argument because it directly refutes the “historically thin” framing of India as a young nation-state born in 1947. This evidence grounds the Republic in a continuous, indigenous heritage that is thousands of years old, providing the moral and historical standing to challenge compressed colonial chronologies and assert its own civilizational narrative. The convergence of textual, celestial, and terrestrial data supports the view of Sanatan civilization as a deep-time phenomenon.

The collective weight of evidence from multiple disciplines points to a civilizational horizon stretching back millennia:

1. Archaeoastronomical Evidence: Ancient Indian texts encoded sophisticated astronomical observations into ritual manuals and epics. The Vedāṅga Jyotiṣa, the oldest astronomical text linked to the Vedas, contains descriptions of solstices that align with the sky as it appeared around 1400–1200 BCE. The Mahābhārata contains numerous references to eclipses and planetary positions that have led modern researchers to propose dates for the Kurukṣetra war around c. 3067 BCE. More ambitious proposals, such as that by Nilesh Nilkanth Oak, push the date to 5561 BCE based on a unique convergence of astronomical constraints, including the observation of the Arundhatī–Vasiṣṭha pair. The Rāmāyaṇa, rich with similar celestial data, is placed by Oak in an even earlier era. While these specific dates are debated, the studies consistently place the epic narratives in deep antiquity, challenging colonial chronologies.
2. Archaeological and Geological Corroboration: Physical evidence from the land corroborates the deep-time textual horizon. Archaeological excavations at sites like Mehrgarh reveal continuous settled agrarian life in the northwestern subcontinent from at least the 7th millennium BCE, providing a material foundation for the development of a complex ritual and astronomical culture. Furthermore, palaeochannel studies of the Ghaggar–Hakra river system confirm the existence of a mighty river, often identified with the Vedic Sarasvatī, that supported dense urban settlements during the Harappan period. Geological studies of the chain of shoals known as Rāma Setu between India and Sri Lanka also provide a real-world landscape context for events described in the Rāmāyaṇa.

While scholars continue to debate precise dates, the powerful convergence of this multi-domain evidence supports an undeniable conclusion: Sanatan civilization is a deep-time phenomenon, not a recent historical construct. This antiquity provides the Republic with a profound and authentic anchor in its own indigenous heritage, granting it the moral authority to define its identity on its own terms.

4.0 The Living Sanatan Matrix: Cultural and Social Continuity in Modern India

The Sanatan identity is not merely an ancient legacy confined to texts and archaeological sites; it is a living, pervasive force that actively shapes contemporary Indian life. This “civilizational grammar” provides a unifying cultural and ethical matrix that transcends regional, linguistic, and even religious divides. Understanding this continuity is essential, as it demonstrates that the call for constitutional recognition is not an attempt to impose an alien identity but to acknowledge the very fabric of the nation’s daily existence.

The living Sanatan matrix is visible across four key dimensions:

1. Sacred Geography: India’s physical landscape is also a sacred one. Rivers like the Ganga, Yamuna, and Kaveri are revered as living goddesses, and mountains like the Himalayas are considered the abode of divinities. A dense network of pilgrimage sites (tīrthas)—from the Char Dham to the twelve jyotir-lingas and countless local shrines—weaves the entire subcontinent into a single sacred map. This sacralized geography is not exclusive; it integrates Sufi dargahs, Buddhist stupas, Jain tirthas, and Sikh gurudwaras into the same civilizational fabric.
2. People and Practices: The rhythm of life for most Indians is marked by common life-cycle rituals (saṃskāras) for birth, marriage, and death. Household worship, the lighting of lamps, and offerings to guests and ancestors are near-universal practices. The ethical ideas of dharma, karma, punya (merit), and seva (service) permeate daily language and moral reasoning. This cultural influence is so profound that even many Indian Muslims and Christians participate in local customs and use an ethical vocabulary that is unmistakably Dharmic in origin.
3. Time and Festivals: The Indian public calendar is structured by a cycle of Dharmic festivals that mark cosmic and moral rhythms. Deepavali celebrates the triumph of light over darkness, Holi marks renewal, and festivals like Makar Sankranti and Pongal align with solar and agrarian cycles. While festivals of other traditions, such as Eid and Christmas, are integrated as national holidays, the underlying pattern of public time remains fundamentally Dharmic, shaping the collective experience of the year.
4. Shared Ethical Lexicon: Across India’s vast linguistic diversity, a common moral vocabulary provides a coherent ethical grammar. Words such as dharma, satya, ahimsa, daya (compassion), seva, and shraddha (faith) recur in languages from Tamil to Bengali to Gujarati, carrying similar moral weight and meaning. Through this shared lexicon, Sanatan civilization continues to speak in many tongues while articulating a unified ethical vision.

The undeniable reality of this living matrix provides the cultural foundation upon which the Indian state rests. The next section will explore the dissonance between this reality and the legal and political framework of the Republic.

5.0 Constitutional Dissonance: Original Intent versus the Secular Mask

A central problem confronting the Indian Republic is a profound constitutional dissonance. While the nation’s foundational visual and symbolic language explicitly embeds it within a continuous Sanatan civilizational arc, a later-imposed political vocabulary—namely, “secularism”—has obscured this reality, creating deep structural and philosophical contradictions. This conflict between the original vision and the secular mask constitutes a deliberate act of civilizational negation.

The Original Sanatan Vision of the Constitution

An examination of the original, handwritten Constitution of 1950 reveals the clear intent of its framers to ground the new Republic in its ancient heritage. Under the artistic direction of Nandalal Bose, the manuscript was adorned with illustrations that serve as a powerful visual testament to this vision.

1. Visual Narrative: The artwork creates an unbroken historical narrative, beginning with motifs from the Indus Valley Civilization and scenes from the Vedic period. The deliberate omission of these iconic images from common reproductions of the Constitution is a subtle but potent act of intellectual and cultural erasure, contributing to a state of cultural disorientation.
2. Fundamental Rights: The section on Fundamental Rights (Part III) is symbolically anchored by an illustration depicting the return of Rama, Sita, and Lakshmana to Ayodhya. This choice links the concept of universal rights to the Dharmic ideal of Rāma-Rājya—a state defined by justice, righteousness, and ethical governance.
3. Directive Principles: The chapter on Directive Principles of State Policy (Part IV) is introduced with the iconic image of Krishna imparting the Bhagavad Gita to Arjuna on the battlefield of Kurukshetra. This places the principles of wise counsel and selfless action (Karma Yoga) at the heart of the state’s moral and policy aspirations.
4. State Symbols: The adoption of the Lion Capital of Ashoka from Sarnath as the State Emblem and the Upanishadic motto “Satyameva Jayate” (“Truth Alone Triumphs”) further reinforces the Republic’s identity as the modern expression of a timeless Dharmic civilization.

The Imposition of the “Secular” Mask

This original, integrated vision was fundamentally altered by the 42nd Amendment of 1976, enacted during the national Emergency when democratic processes were suspended. This amendment inserted the words “socialist” and “secular” into the Preamble. This act constitutes a “legal forgery” because the amended Preamble retains the original adoption date of November 26, 1949, misrepresenting the historical consensus of the founders. The amendment did not create religious freedom—which was already robustly guaranteed—but instead grafted a European-derived vocabulary onto a distinctly Indian civilizational context.

The Practical Consequences of Dissonance

The practical implementation of this imported “secularism” has created structural imbalances and failed to deliver on its promise of true neutrality, evolving into a system of “‘State management and control of the majority religion,’ while granting exemptions or autonomy to others.”

1. Unequal State Intervention: The state exercises deep control over thousands of Hindu temples and their finances through state-level Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments (HR&CE) acts, justified under Articles 25(2)(a) and 26(d). This stands in stark contrast to the administrative and financial autonomy enjoyed by minority religious institutions.
2. Failure of Uniformity: The persistence of separate personal laws for different religious communities contradicts the principle of equal citizenship. The state’s failure to implement a Uniform Civil Code (UCC), as mandated by the Directive Principle in Article 44, perpetuates legal disunity.
3. Legislative Imbalance: Post-independence laws such as the Places of Worship Act (1991), which freezes the status of religious sites as of 1947, and the Wakf Act (1995), which grants extensive powers to Wakf Boards, have created a legislative framework that structurally favors certain communities over others.
4. Educational Privilege: Article 30 grants religious and linguistic minorities the right to establish and administer their own educational institutions with a degree of autonomy not afforded to the majority community, creating an unequal playing field in the crucial sector of education.

This dissonance has created a state that is philosophically confused and structurally imbalanced. The proposed Dharmic framework seeks to resolve these contradictions by re-aligning the state with its authentic identity while ensuring true equality for all.

6.0 A Dharmic Republic for All: Reconciling National Identity and Minority Rights

A primary concern regarding the proposal for a Sanatan civilizational state is its potential impact on minorities. However, this framework, contrary to such fears, offers a more robust, authentic, and philosophically grounded guarantee of minority rights than the current politically fraught model of secularism. A nation that is secure and confident in its own civilizational identity is inherently better equipped to be generous and fair to its internal diversity.

To address this issue with clarity, it is crucial to distinguish between Islam as a world religion, Indian Muslims as a diverse and integral community, and Islamism as a modern political ideology that often seeks an exclusivist state. The critique presented in this proposal is aimed squarely at intolerant, exclusivist political ideologies that reject pluralism, not at any community of faith. This ideology found its most consequential political expression in the All-India Muslim League’s Two-Nation Theory, which rejected a composite Indian nationhood and directly led to the catastrophic Partition of the subcontinent.

The proposed “Darmic Response” to such ideological challenges is a posture best described as “open-handed but straight-backed.” This means being uncompromising in upholding the rule of law against any violent or separatist ideologies. Simultaneously, it means being scrupulously fair and open-handed in offering equal rights, security, and dignity to all individual citizens willing to live under a pluralistic republican order. Collective punishment or the creation of second-class citizenship would be a violation of both Dharma and the Constitution.

The Sanatani ethos itself acts as the most potent shield for minorities. The ancient principle of Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam (“The world is one family”) provides a powerful, Ahimsa-based mandate against state-sanctioned persecution. This philosophical commitment to seeing the divine in all beings is far more resilient and deeply rooted than the fragile mechanism of political secularism. Historically, it was this inclusive ethos that allowed diverse communities—from Jews and Zoroastrians to various Christian and Muslim denominations—to find shelter and flourish in India for centuries.

Ultimately, a Dharmic Republic anchors minority rights not in political concession but in a profound philosophical respect for life and diverse paths to truth. By moving from a state of perpetual identity conflict to one of civilizational confidence, India can create a more stable and just environment for all its citizens.

7.0 Policy Recommendations: A Framework for Constitutional Realignment

Translating the vision of a Sanatan Civilizational Republic into reality requires a series of deliberate and phased constitutional, legislative, and educational reforms. These recommendations are designed not to create a theocracy, but to align the state’s formal structure with its authentic civilizational soul, thereby resolving existing contradictions and fostering a more cohesive national identity. The following steps provide a practical framework for this realignment.

1. Constitutional Reaffirmation: Amend the Preamble of the Constitution to replace the word “Secular” with a more culturally authentic and philosophically precise term such as “Dharmic” or “Civilizational Republic.” This would formally acknowledge that Bharat’s governance is anchored in indigenous ethical principles of justice, order, and pluralism, rather than a borrowed and poorly fitting Western concept.
2. Ensuring Equal Citizenship through a Uniform Civil Code: Mandate the legislative design and phased implementation of a Uniform Civil Code (UCC), as envisioned in Article 44. This is essential to ensure that all citizens, regardless of religious affiliation, are subject to one set of civil laws in matters of marriage, divorce, inheritance, and family law, thereby fulfilling the constitutional promise of equality before the law.
3. Establishing Institutional Equality and Autonomy: Repeal or fundamentally reform the state-level Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments (HR&CE) acts to end direct government control over the administration and finances of Hindu temples. All religious institutions should be granted administrative autonomy while being subject to comparable, non-discriminatory standards of financial transparency and public accountability.
4. Implementing Civilizational Literacy in Education: Reform the national educational curriculum to integrate knowledge of India’s core civilizational texts (such as the Ramayana and Mahabharata), foundational philosophical traditions (Vedic, Buddhist, Jain, Sikh), and history as shared cultural literacy for all students, irrespective of their faith. This is not catechism; it is shared cultural literacy. This should be paired with a reform of Article 30 to ensure that all educational institutions adhere to common standards and do not operate with undue privilege.
5. Infusing Governance with a Dharmic Ethos: Promote the principles of Rājadharma (the duty of rulers) and seva (service) in public administration and governance. This involves reinforcing the idea that public office is a sacred trust and a duty to protect the weak, restrain the strong, and uphold justice without fear or favor, thereby cultivating an ethos of ethical statecraft.

These carefully sequenced recommendations provide a clear pathway to achieve the constitutional and structural integrity necessary for India to realize its full potential as a modern republic rooted in its ancient civilizational identity.

8.0 Conclusion: From Political Swaraj to Civilizational Swa-Dharma

This proposal for the constitutional recognition of India as a Sanatan Civilizational Republic is not a call for theocracy or a departure from democratic principles. It is an argument for authenticity—for aligning the formal structure of the Indian state with the living, breathing soul of the nation it governs. For too long, India has navigated its post-independence journey using a borrowed vocabulary that obscures, and at times contradicts, its own profound heritage. This has led to structural imbalances, political manipulation, and a chronic sense of cultural disorientation.

The argument rests on clear and verifiable pillars: the demonstrable deep-time antiquity of Sanatan civilization; its persistence as a living cultural and ethical grammar in modern India; the original symbolic intent of the Constitution’s framers, who firmly embedded the Republic in this civilizational narrative; and the distortions and inequalities introduced by imported political ideologies that are alien to India’s historical experience of pluralism. Reforming these distortions is not an act of exclusion but one of restoration and reconciliation.

By formally acknowledging its Sanatan foundations, Bharat can finally complete its journey of independence. This represents the natural and necessary fulfillment of its decolonization—a transition from mere political freedom (Swaraj) to a deeper, more resonant alignment of the state with its inherent civilizational ethos (Swa-Dharma). A republic that is secure in its identity, honest about its roots, and guided by the time-tested principles of Dharma offers not only a path to internal stability and flourishing for India, but also a stable, rooted, and authentically pluralistic model of “civilizational democracy” for a fractured world.

Thank you!