Constitutional Morality vs Social Morality in the 21st Century

India’s constitutional disputes in the twenty-first century are increasingly
argued as moral conflicts, even when their legal form is doctrinally familiar.
Debates about sexuality, gender equality, caste dignity, religious practice, free
speech and offence, dissent, surveillance, and welfare distribution are now
routinely conducted in a vocabulary of “values,” “tradition,” “culture,” and
“community sentiment,” alongside the grammar of rights, proportionality, and
institutional competence. This is not merely a change in rhetorical style. It
reflects an underlying condition of constitutional democracy in a diverse
society: where plural communities contest the moral meaning of public life,
constitutional adjudication must decide whether the state may enforce
dominant norms as law, and if so, on what justifications and within what limits.