The idea that a constitution is a social contract is no longer a purely philosophical proposition; it has strong historical roots. The Mayflower Compact of 1620 stands as one of the earliest documentary proofs that political communities have deliberately constituted themselves through explicit agreements. Drafted and signed by the pilgrims upon their arrival in America, the Compact represented a consensual pact through which free individuals agreed to form a “civil body politic” and abide by collectively framed laws.It fulfilled all the elements of a contract: free consent, competent parties, a lawful object, and lawful consideration in the form of collective security, self-government, and mutual obligation. Modern constitutions, although more complex, inherit this contractual lineage. They embody foundational agreements between the State and citizen, delineating governmental powers and guaranteeing individual rights. The Indian Constitution is, therefore, a bi-dimensional social contract: vertically, it structures relations between the State and individuals; horizontally, it governs relations among citizens. Though citizens do not physically “sign” it, the Constitution remains a binding normative framework rooted in collective consent and continuing legitimacy – reflecting the same moral architecture that animated the Mayflower Compact.Close to the madding crowdAs Rohit De and Ornit Shani demonstrate in Assembling India’s Constitution: A New Democratic History (2025), constitution-making in India was far from an elite, closed-door exercise: “The voluminous evidence of public participation in constitution making made clear that the debates within the Constituent Assembly can only be understood as a part of a landscape of contestations and engagements spanning the debating halls of princely states’ darbars, trade unions, refugee camps, temples and mosques, churches and street corners, universities and classrooms, within civic associations, in tribal villages and deep forests, and among the Indian Diaspora.”Constitution-making, they argue, was mediated through a vast array of social and cultural spaces, where people advanced their particular demands through a vision of the common good.In this sense, the Indian public restlessly negotiated their own Mayflower Compact by creating a veritable republic of letters. Individuals and collectives from remote hamlets, bustling bazaars, and community forums engaged with the constitutional process, refusing to be passive spectators. As De earlier pointed out in A People’s Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic (2018), this negotiation never truly ended; it has continued through everyday forms of legal engagement, producing a “portable constitution” with unwritten and informal dimensions.An offer the citizen can’t refuseDe and Shani remind us that “The Indian public, however, was not invited to participate or to be educated about the constitution through the process of its making. They demanded a right to participate, ripped down the veil between the assembly members and the people, and exposed the process to more scrutiny and participation. This fact has been ignored and erased from any narrative of the constitutional founding. Perhaps also, the so-called constitutional makers had a vested in erasing this public effort to emphasise the importance of their own labour”This erasure reflects an asymmetry: while the public struggled to democratise the process, the State gradually concentrated political power in its own hands. The resulting social contract bears the marks of this skewed origin – an unconscionable bargain where the State becomes unduly enriched in power while citizens’ natural rights are placed at the mercy of executive discretion.This imbalance is most visible in the Constitution’s emergency architecture. Emergency provisions (Articles 352–359) grant the Union executive unilateral authority to suspend rights and centralise power in moments it defines as “exceptional”. Arvind Narrain, in India’s Undeclared Emergency: Constitutionalism and the Politics of Resistance (2021), argues that while the 1975 Emergency was formally declared, today the same logic permeates governance informally. Exceptional powers initially meant for rare crises have seeped into routine administration, producing what he terms an “institutional emergency” that erodes constitutional guarantees.Preventive detention sharpens this asymmetry. Article 22 constitutionalises the power to incarcerate without trial – what judges in A.K. Gopalan called “sinister” and “out of place in a democratic constitution” –yet upheld. Narrain documents how courts have not only validated preventive-detention statutes but have also sanctioned de facto detention through anti-terror laws such as UAPA, enabling long pre-trial incarceration where “process becomes punishment.”In a political climate marked by majoritarian nationalism, these tools disproportionately target dissenters, students, journalists, and minorities. What began as an exception has become an everyday instrument of coercion.Similarly, Article 19’s liberties are weakened by over-broad restriction clauses – public order, security, sovereignty – interpreted with extensive judicial deference. As Narrain shows, this has facilitated censorship, suppression of protest, and an aggressive national-security discourse, producing patterns of repression that mimic Emergency-era behaviour without requiring a formal proclamation.Together, emergency powers, preventive detention, and diluted Article 19 freedoms produce a classic unconscionable bargain: citizens owe loyalty, taxes, and obedience, while the State retains the power to curtail liberty at will. In contractual terms, it becomes “a deal one cannot refuse”– one that the dominant party can rewrite at its discretion.Insurgent constitutionalismThe path forward lies in reclaiming the democratic energy and constitutional passion exhibited by ordinary Indians in the 1940s. The Constitution has already served as a catalyst for political struggles and social movements – against caste and religious discrimination, for gender justice, for rights to food and work, for transparency, decentralisation, and the empowerment of tribal and Dalit communities. Nivedita Menon describes these developments as “insurgent constitutionalism”.Kalpana Kannabiran calls for a “radical public reading of the Constitution”. While citizens may not have the power to rewrite the social contract, they can actively monitor, contest, and transform the practices of constitutional governance. Through sustained constitutional activism and pedagogy, citizens can challenge the skewed bargains of the past and work toward a more egalitarian and equitable constitutional order.Faisal C.K. is Deputy Law Secretary to the Government of Kerala and author of The Supreme Codex: A Citizen’s Anxieties and Aspirations on the Indian Constitution.