On Republic Day, we are reminded of the Preamble, yet the lived experience of millions stands in utter incongruity to its text. Article 25 and its companion rights pledge every Indian the freedom of conscience, belief, and worship. Article 30 gives minorities the right to run educational institutions. Before these words, and after them, countless citizens find themselves abandoned by law and by state power.

The recent Odisha incident, wherein a pastor was assaulted, is just the latest in the spectacle of savagery. A mob marched into a prayer gathering, beat him, garlanded him with slippers, forced him to consume cow dung and coerced him to chant a religious slogan.

This was an act of humiliation, not simply violence. Actions like these are meant to signal that the disparity of faith is a trigger for public degradation and that coercion has superseded constitutional citizenship.

Local police only registered an FIR after the pastor's wife persistently escalated the matter to senior authorities. Nine suspects were detained; nevertheless, the delay uncloaks the gulf between legal protections on paper and police response in practice.

This violence finds roots in everyday pressures on minorities to capitulate. Accusations of "forced conversion"—a crime already enshrined in various treacherous state laws—are routinely wielded as pretexts for intimidation. These laws are framed as maintaining public order even as they carve out unequal treatment for specific faiths.

The Republic Day should be a moment of truth. The republic cannot be measured by ceremonies and parades. It must be judged by whose rights are protected, whose bodies are safe in public spaces, and whose prayers are free from threat. When people can be assaulted with impunity, and minorities feel pressured into submission, the republic has failed its citizens. A nation that cannot protect its weakest cannot claim its constitutional ideals.

Tragically, the avenues for rectification and redressal, too, are swiftly straitening. Only a few voices of sanity remain; most, including the judiciary today, speak the language of déraison. Take, for example, the judiciary's neoteric citation of the Manusmriti to uphold a judgment, as if there were no precedents and laws, reskinned of late, did not exist.

We have surely come a long way since 1950, when the Constitution was enforced and we became a republic. The journey was never smooth. The worst of it was maybe during the Emergency, but that lasted only 21 months, after which elections were held, and we returned to some semblance of a democratic republic. Then the rights were cancelled by decree; today, they are habitually supplanted.

Today, we can no longer claim to be a democratic republic, a majoritarian ersatz-republic, maybe. All the guarantees given by the Constitution have basically been and continue to be trampled, and the worst hit are, as always, the minorities.