Who decides the rules?

Picture the last day before the holidays. Your class gets the hall to itself for one hour. No timetable, no teacher, just thirty-odd children and a football.

For about four minutes it is wonderful. Then three things happen at once. Someone wants to play carrom and someone else wants to play football in the same corner. The football team cannot agree whether that last goal counted. And nobody has decided who carries the carrom board back.

Nothing terrible has happened. But the hour is already going wrong, and it is going wrong in a very particular way — a way that repeats in a housing society, in a village, in a city of two crore people, and in a country of about 140 crore.

This lesson is about the thing groups invent to stop that happening. We call it government.

Go back to the hall. What actually went wrong?

• Two people wanted the same corner. Not because either was bad, but because there was one corner and two good ideas for it.
• Nobody could settle the goal argument. Both sides were sure. Sureness is not a referee.
• A job that helped everybody — carrying the board back — belonged to nobody.

These three troubles are not about children, and they are not about football. They turn up whenever people share anything: a road, a river, a railway line, a playground, a hospital queue.

A rule is a promise the group makes in advance, so that it does not have to argue about the same thing every single time.

Here is the thing most people miss. Writing the five rules is the easy part.

Suppose your rules are perfect. Somebody still has to:

• decide what the rules are in the first place, and change them when they stop working;
• do the things the rules promise — actually fetch the carrom board, actually mark the pitch;
• judge what happened when two people tell the story differently.

Three different jobs. Three different skills. And — this is the big idea of the whole topic — three jobs that a sensible group does not hand to the same person.

Leave the hall and walk into an ordinary apartment building or a village lane. The same three jobs are already there, and nobody called them government.

In a residents' association, the people who live in the building meet and agree rules: no loud music after ten, ₹500 a month from every flat for the lift. That is the rule-making job. A secretary and a treasurer then collect the money, call the lift mechanic and pay the electricity bill. That is the carrying-out job. And when two neighbours quarrel about a parking slot, the committee hears both and decides. That is the settling job.

Now make the group bigger. A village. A district. A state with more people than most countries in the world. The three jobs do not change. Only two things change:

1. You cannot all fit in one room any more. So the group chooses some people to speak for it.
2. The jobs get too big for volunteers. So they become full-time offices with rules of their own.

So a country needs people to do the three jobs. The next question is the one that has caused more arguments, and more courage, than almost any other in history: who gets to choose them?

For most of human history the answer was: nobody chose. You were ruled by whoever was born into the right family, or whoever had the largest army.

India's answer, written into its Constitution, is different. The people choose. Every citizen aged 18 or older gets one vote, and every vote counts exactly the same — the richest person in the state and the poorest person in the village cancel each other out precisely.

That idea has a name: democracy, from two old Greek words meaning people and power.

When India became independent in 1947, it faced the biggest version of the hall problem ever attempted. Hundreds of millions of people, dozens of languages, princely states, and a country that had just been governed by somebody else for a very long time.

So a large group of people — the Constituent Assembly — sat down to write the rule book. They first met on 9 December 1946. They argued, drafted, re-drafted and argued again for 1,083 days, a little under three years, and adopted the finished Constitution on 26 November 1949.

They did not switch it on straight away. They waited 61 days and brought it into force on 26 January 1950 — a date chosen deliberately, because it was already being remembered by people who had demanded complete independence twenty years earlier.

The Constitution opens with a single sentence called the Preamble. It is the only part most Indians can half-remember, and it is worth slowing down for, because it is the promise the rest of the book tries to keep.

It begins "WE, THE PEOPLE OF INDIA" — not we, the rulers, not we, the assembly. Four words that decide where power comes from.

It then describes the country the people are making: a sovereign, socialist, secular, democratic republic. Five heavy words. Here is what each one means, in ordinary language.

Now we can put real Indian names on the three jobs. The Constitution calls them the three organs of government, which is a nicely chosen word: not three separate machines, but three organs of one body, each doing something the others cannot.

India is far too big for one office in New Delhi to fix your street light. So the three jobs are also split a second way — not by kind of job this time, but by how close the job is to you.

• Local government — your gram panchayat, or your town's municipality. Closest to you, smallest budget, and the one you are most likely to meet in person.
• State government — one for each of India's states, and its own arrangements for the Union Territories. Police, most schools, hospitals, agriculture, roads within the state.
• Union government — the whole country. Defence, foreign affairs, railways, the rupee, passports, posts.

Splitting a country's power between a central government and state governments like this has a name: a federal structure. India's version is unusual, because the Constitution writes down exactly which subjects belong to whom, in three lists. You will meet those lists properly in Investigate.

Every five years or so, India does something no other country on Earth does at this size. Roughly 97.8 crore people are on the voters' list. Polling stations are set up in deserts, on islands, in forests and high in the mountains — including some that exist for a tiny handful of voters, because the rule is that no voter should have to travel too far.

On the day itself, a voter walks in, gives their name, has a finger marked with indelible ink so they cannot vote twice, steps behind a screen and presses one button on an electronic voting machine (EVM). A small window lights up and shows a printed slip with the chosen symbol for about seven seconds — that is the VVPAT, the paper trail that lets the machine be checked. Then the slip drops into a sealed box.

Nobody watches you press the button. That is not politeness; it is the law. A secret ballot means nobody — not your employer, not a candidate, not your neighbour — can find out how you voted, so nobody can usefully threaten you about it.

A constitution is a two-way promise. It tells the government what it may do — and it also tells the government what it may never do to you.

The Constitution lists a set of Fundamental Rights in 6 groups. They are not favours handed out by whoever is in charge. They belong to you, and if a government or an official breaks one, you can go straight to a court about it.

The Constitution also lists 11 Fundamental Duties: things every citizen is expected to do. They work differently from rights. A court will not usually punish you for failing one; they are there as a description of what being a citizen asks of you.

Several of them are surprisingly doable at your age:

• respect the Constitution, the National Flag and the National Anthem;
• protect and improve the natural environment — forests, lakes, rivers and wildlife — and have compassion for living creatures;
• develop the scientific temper: the habit of asking for evidence instead of accepting a claim because somebody loud said it;
• safeguard public property, which includes not scratching the bus seat and not breaking the park bench;
• promote harmony between people of every religion, language and region.

Read that list again and notice something. Almost none of it needs a vote, an office or an adult's permission.

Voting is the loudest thing a citizen does, but it happens once in five years and takes two minutes. The rest of the time, the ways in are quieter and far more available — including to people too young to vote.

Start in a hall with thirty children, one football and no rules. End in a republic of about a hundred and forty crore people. The same three jobs the whole way up: make the rules, carry them out, settle disputes about them — kept in different hands on purpose, at three different distances from your front door, under one rule book that the people gave themselves.

That is the shape of it. The next layer, Understand, fills in how each part actually works: what happens inside the two Houses of Parliament, how a bill becomes an Act, what the President does that the Prime Minister does not, and how a court can tell Parliament that it has gone too far.