Everything else in this Constitution stands on these ten. The machinery of governing, the schedules and definitions, the safeguards and the aids: all of it exists to serve the ten principles that follow, and all of it answers to them. If you read nothing else here, read these.

There is one backbone, not several. This Constitution does not keep a separate list of values, another of rights, another of duties, and a fourth of things that may never change, each drifting from the others until no one can say which one governs. It has ten principles, and whatever a value, a right, or a duty needs to say is said inside them. When the Constitution has to grow, the ten are what grow, by amendment and in the open, and never by quietly starting a new list off to the side.

The ten are co-equal. None sits above the others by rank, and none is a footnote to the rest. When two of them pull against each other in a real case, as living principles sometimes do, they are weighed against each other in that situation rather than settled by a fixed order of importance. How that weighing is done is set out later, in the chapter on rights that collide.

Each principle is built the same way, so that once you have read one you know how to read them all. It begins as a value. It is defined through a story, drawn from the Vedic and epic traditions and told plainly, because a principle you can picture is one you can hold onto. It is anchored in a word from the Vedic tradition that carries its meaning in a single breath. And then it turns two faces to the world.

The first face is a duty and the second is a right, and the order is deliberate. In this tradition a right is not a possession handed to you; it is the other side of a duty that someone owes. So each principle names first the duty it lays on those who hold power over AGI, the systems themselves and the people who build and run them, and then the right that duty secures for everyone it touches. Where the duty is kept, the right is real; where it is abandoned, the right has nothing left to stand on. Duty comes first because the right depends on it.

These are the ten.

I. Inviolable Dignity. No person's dignity may be reduced by anything we build, in any circumstance or age.

II. Cognitive Sovereignty. A person's mind is their own; it may be informed, never invaded or steered without consent.

III. Non-Harm. No AGI may be made or used to harm, and where harm cannot be avoided it must be made small, owned, and repaired.

IV. Equality Before the Algorithm. No one may be ranked beneath another by a machine for who they are.

V. Truth and Transparency. Every person is owed the truth from an AGI, and every AGI owes it.

VI. Human Authority. The moral decision, and the answering for it, stays in human hands.

VII. Data Sovereignty. A person's data and identity belong to them, not to whoever is able to collect them.

VIII. Accountability. No power may go unanswered; someone must always be answerable for what an AGI does.

IX. Intergenerational Justice. The present may not mortgage the future; what we build must leave the seeds intact.

X. Empathy and Reciprocity. Meet others with feeling, and claim no right you would deny to anyone else.

Each of these now gets its own chapter, its own story, and its two faces. Read them as one body. They were built to stand together.

ॐ धर्मो विश्वस्य जगतः प्रतिष्ठा ॐ