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| Edited By: Rakesh Bhatnagar |Source: DNA |Updated: Nov 19, 2013, 11:17 PM IST
It’s every citizen’s pride to rejoice at the birth anniversary of the Constitution that came into being on January 26, 1950. But is there any other reason to celebrate the 59th Republic Day? The poser leaves many an ingenious mind searching for a cogent reply.
This year witnessed disturbing trends that pointedly raised a question on the constitutional rights of ‘We the People’.
Merely within a year of the Constitution’s birth, the then prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru introduced the first amendment inserting provision (g) in Article 19, right to free speech and expression, making this guarantee conditional.
A few years later, the Parliament infused the 9th schedule in the Constitution to protect 13 socialistic laws from judicial scrutiny.
Until the Supreme Court (SC) screened this provision last year, at least 250 other laws had been added to the 9th schedule either to circumvent the judicial directions or were laced with political exigency. Even the state governments started adding to the list
making it the most abused amendment.
The last 94th amendment, however, is the most controversial parliamentary exercise. It relates to Article 15 that deals with the advancement of any socially and educationally backward classes, SCs and STs. The 27% quota for OBCs in aided educational institutions shocked the country after the SC upheld this amendment putting a rider — the government must determine OBCs on the basis of economic criteria and not caste considerations.
Ex CJI MN Venkatachaliah, 80, the noted legal luminary who once headed the panel to determine whether the Constitution failed the country, or the countrymen failed it, said “so much has gone wrong. The way we function demonstrates that we aren’t a fit democracy’”. “The only hope rests with the media,” he added. Venkatachaliah was ‘shocked’ at the chief justice of India’s resistance against revealing whether judges disclose their assets to him. “The RTI Act is the finest thing that happened to this country,” he said. But rampant corruption is eating the vitals of democracy.
