Past the midnight hour as the day dawned on 15th August 1947, we, the people of India awoke to freedom and made a tryst with destiny, later articulated in the great instrument - Constitution which came into full force on 26th January 1950. What is the basic structure of the Constitution, its fundamental features? A socialistic pattern of society, a secular Bharat where no caste, creed or gender divides one human from another, a democratic ethos and eidos which would be the nidus and nisus of a substantively egalitarian community-such is the vision I had when as a young man I breathed free Indian air and just constitutional order. Corruption, ‘in widest commonalty spread’ was creeping in and has now made a quantum jump. Elections are breeding corrupt practices and Parties revel in abuse of power and authoritarian terror. Swaraj is mirage if Videsh Raj grabs. Alas, my dream has vanished and a nightmare is darkening the Indian sky. What shall I do except to struggle for the finer values of our Preamble?
I stand for that great Bharat where finer values matter, where our cultural heritage is not obliterated by communal and consumerist craze and where pomp and pelf do not extirpate simplicity and dignity. Of course, I know the battle is hard but, in the words of Mahatma Gandhi:
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you,
Then you win.

—V. R. Krishna Iyer