When the framers crafted the Constitution, they did more than distribute powers and guarantee rights; they attempted to shape a certain kind of citizen. The later addition of Article 51A(h) by Forty-Second Amendment Act, 1976 – the duty “to develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform” – was not a routine amendment but a civilizational reminder. It signalled that a republic survives not only through institutions and elections, but through the quality of reasoning its citizens bring to public life.
India’s scientific achievements are remarkable, as evidenced by its lunar missions, vaccine innovations, and technological advancements, which attest to the nation’s capabilities. Yet constitutional maturity requires more than technological prowess. A society may reach the Moon and still falter at home if superstition masquerades as knowledge, if assertion outcompetes evidence, and if political charisma substitutes for scrutiny. The Constitution foresaw the risk that modern institutions could coexist with pre-modern habits of thought.
Scientific temper was never meant to oppose faith or culture. It was envisioned as a civic method: asking for proof, testing assertions, revising beliefs, and distinguishing metaphor from fact. It aimed to immunise the republic against deception and ensure democratic decisions rest on reasoned judgment rather than amplified belief.
But this duty, perhaps the Constitution’s most quietly radical instruction, remains among its least practised. As political rhetoric drifts into pseudoscience and digital ecosystems reward virality over verification, the republic’s reasoning culture faces acute strain. The real question today is not whether India can produce scientific excellence, but whether it can nurture a public sphere that respects scientific reasoning.
A constitution may endure without perfect citizens, but it cannot endure a citizenry indifferent to inquiry. In an age of misinformation, scientific temper must be reclaimed as a democratic virtue.
Why India Constitutionalised a Mindset
Independent India entered modern constitutionalism at a moment when science was equated with self-confidence, rational planning, hunger-reform, technology, and industrial modernisation. The early decades of national planning privileged institution-building – universities of inquiry, atomic energy missions and ambitious engineering foundations. However, by the 1970s, constitutional discourse acknowledged a perceptible imbalance: the voice of rights had become louder than the voice of responsibilities. Fundamental Duties were therefore introduced not as punitive clauses but as civic expectations, meant to revive citizenship obligations without criminalising cultural existence. Successive governments, however, have undermined this through budget cuts such as the University Grants Commission’s 61 per cent reduction in 2024 and a minimal GDP allocation to science and education, the lowest among BRICS nations, which stifles the nurturing of scientific consciousness.
Unlike enforceable rights or directive principles, Article 51A(h) became a statement about democratic character. The Constitution described scientific temper not as mastery of scientific facts, but as mastery over how facts are interpreted. Courts have since referred to 51A(h) in several advisory capacities, linking it to public education, environmental discourse, secular citizenship and policy rationale. Yet judicial references alone were insufficient to popularise this ethic, because unlike enforceable rights, Fundamental Duties require social transmission, not legal enforcement.
This is precisely why 51A(h) matters more, not less. Its location in the Constitution acknowledges that democracies don’t collapse because citizens lack opinions, but because citizens stop demanding proof for assertions, allowing power, virality and repetition to replace evidence, method and scrutiny.
Scientific Temper Means A Democratic Habit of Mind
The phrase scientific temper carries deceptive simplicity. It is often mistaken for scientism or a rejection of religion, but the Constitution deliberately avoided this binary. By pairing scientific temper with humanism and reform, it signalled an ethic of compassionate reason. Scientific temper means cultivating habits that demand evidence, reject unverifiable claims, revise assumptions when proof improves, and prefer inquiry over assertion. It also democratises knowledge through debate, dissent and questioning of power, challenging authoritarian tendencies while advancing understanding across society.
It is a rebuke to all forms of dogma, including political dogma. Scientific temper does not seek uniformity of belief but uniformity of reasoning. It thrives in citizens who recognise fallacies, counter absurd causation with logic, treat error as correction in progress and regard inquiry not as disloyalty but as a democratic duty.
Anti-Science Discourse from Power
One of the gravest risks to 51A(h) is not folk mythology or inherited belief, but political actors occupying constitutional offices presenting mythic or emotional causation as literal biological or historical truth. Democracies everywhere tolerate metaphor, civilizational pride and personal myth-making. Problems arise when such metaphors are communicated as factual explanations, nullifying method, replacing scrutiny with applause, and confusing reverence with evidence. Political figures manipulate faith and identity for electoral gains through divisive rhetoric, communal appeals and pseudo-historical narratives, normalising irrationality and polarising communities at the expense of secularism and rational governance.
Claims about non-biological birth, reproduction via emotional phenomena, uncorroborated ancient aviation theories, or medical causation rooted in mysticism rather than method are not religious discourse; they are anti-reason discourse, decorated as cultural assertion. This is why the statements of powerful political speakers matter so profoundly. When error is platform-amplified, it infects the reasoning culture of the republic. In the digital age, misinformation, from COVID-19 vaccine conspiracies to astrology-based policies, thrives amid low literacy and weak regulation, threatening public health and constitutional mandates.
This erodes more than scientific literacy; it erodes democratic literacy. The Constitution did not fear ritual or tradition; it feared precisely this moment when leaders might model irrationality as acceptable reasoning and equate inquiry with disloyal temperament. The drift into irrational governance is not a theological return, but a cognitive regression, risking that the public sphere interprets superstition as culture, speculation as knowledge, metaphor as biology, and error as a civilizational fact.
Such signalling emboldens unverified information to flourish across social platforms, undermining the constitutional ethic of evidence-based public reasoning. Citizens begin to mirror the certainty of leaders, not the logic of science.
Citizens, Not Spectacle, Must Reclaim the Constitutional Mind
India’s democratic experiment is far too mature to be held hostage by absurd causation theories, yet far too vulnerable to discourse models that equate discovery with mythic certainty. Democracies end not when leaders make rhetorical errors, but when citizens stop correcting leaders, assume repetition equals proof, and replace curiosity with reverent certainty. Scientific temper must therefore be demanded from power, not gifted by power. Reactionary forces – caste, patriarchy, religious fundamentalism and elite-driven discrimination – obstruct this by safeguarding privileges against progressive change, while blaming the working class for conservatism despite its embrace of reform.
This is where institutions like schools, media platforms, independent research institutions and civil society organisations become constitutional workshops. Teaching science as a subject builds scientific careers; teaching science as reasoning builds democratic careers. It must now excel at producing mission-driven reasoning.
The Press as Rational Intellect
The press plays a vital epistemic role here. News ecosystems are psychological accelerators of belief or inquiry. Media shaped by headlines rather than hypotheses risks becoming a megaphone for mythic causation. Media rooted in scientific temper insist on verification first and amplification later. It treats misinformation not as entertainment but as civic harm and reframes science as storytelling that invokes curiosity, replaces absurd causation narratives with logical explanation, and promotes reform through evidence, not antagonism. By protecting rationalist voices and fostering critical media literacy, the press can counter digital pseudoscience without ridiculing belief.
This constitutional duty to foster rational public discourse is not censorship but citizenship. The press must learn to neither ridicule culture nor endorse pseudoscience, but encourage inquiry without attacking belief frameworks.
Governance that Accepts Revision
Good governance, constitutionally interpreted, accepts correction without perceiving betrayal. Scientific temper in governance means willingness to revise assumptions, rely on measurable metrics, test claims institutionally, privilege inquiry over applause and incorporate reform when knowledge encourages improvement. This is not a political posture but a constitutional demeanour. When leaders model epistemic humility and transparency, citizens begin to trust science without dismissing culture, criticise claims without criticising communities, and adopt inquiry as social dignity rather than social conflict.
Science That Built Civilisations
Scientific temper has historically been a catalyst for public welfare without antagonising belief frameworks. Social reform movements from the Indian Renaissance onward did not frame reason as civilizational attack but civilizational improvement. Public health reforms, environmental reasoning, technology innovation, economic progress and misinformation resistance were strengthened not by dismembering culture, but by strengthening the reasoning capacity of citizens. Opposing reactionary forces – through decolonial, non-Eurocentric knowledge traditions – upholds constitutional promises, deepening scientific, secular and democratic consciousness for peace and prosperity.
Climate reasoning today, for example, shows us that societies that respect data without weaponising discourse are the ones that best withstand floods, heatwaves, crop failures and epidemic panic. Scientific temper is therefore not about disproving civilisations but protecting them from misinformation outbreaks, technological deception, and public health non-compliance.
Reforming Reason, Not Replacing Identity
The conversation now moves to action. India requires logic-training modules in schooling that reward questions before answers, fact-checking cells protected from political influence, public AI literacy programming that reaches beyond engineers to municipal neighbourhoods, medical misinformation regulation that treats pseudo-medical claims with the same seriousness as public health harm, and community forums that reward the courage to correct rumour with evidence rather than reward the courage to repeat spectacle as knowledge. Expanding investments in science education, depoliticising identities and reforming curricula for critical thinking will accelerate this, countering elite resistance and cultural inertia.
Scientific temper must enter syllabi as reasoning frameworks, journalism as verification culture, governance as epistemic humility, and citizenship as civic courage to ask for proof.
Democracy Is Misled Not by Belief, but by Lack of Enquiry
The Constitution asked India to reach the Moon, and India did. Yet its sterner call was civilizational: to reach the citizen’s mind, fortify it against deception, discipline it with enquiry, and root it in reason’s dignity. Democracies rarely crumble under belief; they falter when belief lacks scrutiny, emotion buries evidence, authority mimics truth, and spectacle drowns analysis. The peril lies not in excess faith, but deficient doubt.
At this crossroads – cultural ease, political expedience and digital din breeding mythic credulity and smug unknowing – the cure demands neither scorn for heritage nor licence for delusion. It calls for vigilant embodiment of Article 51A(h): reason steering conscience as democratic bulwark. Scientific temper, no scholarly aside, equips citizens to spurn facile certainties, exact verifiable proofs, and guard the republic from untested erosion.
This is the Constitution’s enduring entreaty: a nation of inquiry sans rancour, reason sans derision, reform sans savagery, innovation sans naivety – sustaining honest democracy, answerable rule, sovereign intellects.
India’s horizon beckons not cosmically, but cognitively – through collective vow: contest claims, not kin; unmake lies, not foes; honour enquiry as obligation, not affront; foster science as civic rite, not partisan show. Only then will India honour the Constitution’s deepest expectation, not merely to explore outer space, but to illuminate the inner space of public reason.