Constitution Of India Quotes

If I find the constitution being misused, I shall be the first to burn it.

Constitutional morality is not a natural sentiment. It has to be cultivated. We must realise that our people have yet to learn it. Democracy in India is only a top-dressing on an Indian soil which is essentially undemocratic.

On the 26th of January 1950, we are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality. In politics we will be recognizing the principle of one man one vote and one vote one value. In our social and economic life, we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man one value. How long shall we continue to live this life of contradictions? How long shall we continue to deny equality in our social and economic life? If we continue to deny it for long, we will do so only by putting our political democracy in peril. We must remove this contradiction at the earliest possible moment or else those who suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of political democracy which this Assembly has so laboriously built up.

So long as the Constitution is not amended beyond recognition, so long as elections are held regularly and fairly and the ethos of secularism broadly prevails, so long as citizens can speak and write in the language of their choosing, so long as there is an integrated market and a moderately efficient civil service and army, and — lest I forget — so long as Hindi films are watched and their songs sung, India will survive

To my countrymen who gave unto themselves the constitution but not the ability to keep it,who inherited resplendent heritage but not the wisdom to cherish it,who suffer and endure in pain without the perception of their potential.

Bharat as a civilisation was a reality, and reducing that reality and near-unbroken lived experience to a mere talking point to score brownie points over one another was more a proof of expediency than real conviction in the values the Indic civilisation stood for.

To safeguard democracy the people must have a keen sense of independence, self-respect and their oneness, and should insist upon choosing as their representatives only such persons as are good and true.

India is no longer a constitutional democracy but a populist one.

Famines are easy to prevent if there is a serious effort to do so, and a democratic government, facing elections and criticisms from opposition parties and independent newspapers, cannot help but make such an effort. Not surprisingly, while India continued to have famines under British rule right up to independence … they disappeared suddenly with the establishment of a multiparty democracy and a free press. … a free press and an active political opposition constitute the best early-warning system a country threaten by famines can have

In India, a "bride burning"-- to punish a woman for inadequate dowry or to eliminate her so a man can remarry-- takes place approximately once every two hours, but rarely constitute news.

To prosper, a zoo needs parliamentary government, democratic elections, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of association, rule of law and everything else enshrined in India's Constitution. Impossible to enjoy the animals otherwise. Long-term, bad politics is bad for business.

The ‘modern’, ‘rational’, ‘scientific’, Christian European coloniser could not get himself to acknowledge that the lived experience and traditional knowledge of native societies gathered over millennia could teach him more than a thing or two about living in harmony with nature as opposed to merely salvaging what remained of it in the name of ‘sustainable’ development.

The spiritual character of the relationship between indigeneity and nature is an emotion that the coloniser can at best exoticise but can never relate to.

Time is in essence separation; separation produces pain; pain poesis; and poesis is what constitutes the unending stream of human life in this world.

Who constitutes the nation? Only the elite?Or do the hundreds of millions of poor in India also make up the nation? Are their interests never identified with national interest? Or is there more than one nation? That is the question you often run up against in some of India's poorest areas. Areas where extremely poor people go into destitution making way for firing ranges, jet fighter plants, coal mines, power projects, dams, sanctuaries, prawn and shrimp farms, even poultry farms. If the costs they bear are the 'price' of development, then the rest of the 'nation' is having one endless free lunch.

Coloniality’ refers to the fundamental element or thought process that informs the policy of colonialism and advances the subtler end goal of colonisation, namely colonisation of the mind through complete domination of the culture and worldview of the colonised society.

It’s worth taking the comparison with America a bit further. In the United States, slavery was a 300-year-old institution. After abolition, it took another century of struggle for equality to secure full civil rights for black Americans. A half-century later, the struggle is hardly over. In India, caste has, over several millennia, woven itself into the fabric of society, infused itself as a climate of mind. Was it ever conceivable that one remarkable individual, a bracing, brave Constitution, and a few dozen free elections would blow it away?

The most emerging religion in India is “Religion of News agency”, Though the reality is most of them are driven by asinine deliberative political rhetoric. So, your allegiance towards the nation cannot be impelled by these news outlets, it has to be with living and breathing document “The Constitution of India

despite the experience of other indigenous societies whose precolonial religious identities have been either annihilated or reduced to a minority by the coloniser, in Bharat, the failure of the very same coloniser to significantly convert the indigenous population to his faith is interpreted as proof of his secular and purely mercantile intent.

Let us celebrate the occasion of Indian Constitution Day by being good citizens of India who respect and abide by the constitution of our country.

At least four forms of colonialism are recognised, namely exploitation colonialism, settler colonialism, surrogate colonialism and internal colonialism,

NOTHING should more deeply shame the modern student than the recency and inadequacy of his acquaintance with India. Here is a vast peninsula of nearly two million square miles; two-thirds as large as the United States, and twenty times the size of its master, Great Britain; 320,000,000 souls, more than in all North and South America combined, or one-fifth of the population of the earth; an impressive continuity of development and civilization from Mohenjo-daro, 2900 B.C. or earlier, to Gandhi, Raman and Tagore; faiths compassing every stage from barbarous idolatry to the most subtle and spiritual pantheism; philosophers playing a thousand variations on one monistic theme from the Upanishads eight centuries before Christ to Shankara eight centuries after him; scientists developing astronomy three thousand years ago, and winning Nobel prizes in our own time; a democratic constitution of untraceable antiquity in the villages, and wise and beneficent rulers like Ashoka and Akbar in the capitals; minstrels singing great epics almost as old as Homer, and poets holding world audiences today; artists raising gigantic temples for Hindu gods from Tibet to Ceylon and from Cambodia to Java, or carving perfect palaces by the score for Mogul kings and queens—this is the India that patient scholarship is now opening up, like a new intellectual continent, to that Western mind which only yesterday thought civilization an exclusively European thing.I

coloniality was a form of ‘inception’ performed on the minds of the colonised so that colonialism and colonisation were no more external to their consciousness, but became internal to it.

She was constitutionally unable to endure any man being in love with any woman not herself, and the sight of India Wilkes and Stuart at the speaking had been too much for her predatory nature.

Ramanujan was not the first foreigner to retreat into his shell in a new country; indeed, his was the typical response, not the exceptional one. One later study of Asian and African students in Britain observed that a sense of exclusion “from the life of the community … constituted one of the most serious problems with which they were confronted … [and had] a serious psychological effect” upon them. Another study, this time of Indian students in particular, reported that while 83 percent of them saw friends more or less every day back in India, just 17 percent did while in England.

judiciary, thanks to its independence from state control, strikes the proper balance between the contradicting trends. That is why independence of the judiciary is an inalienable attribute in every Constitution, so

I am the daughter of a mother who would never change...The refusal to modify her aspect, her habits, her attitudes was strategy for resisting American culture, for fighting it, for maintaining her identity...When my mother returns to Calcutta, she is proud of the fact that, in spite of almost fifty years away from India, she seems like a woman who never left. I am the opposite. While the refusal to change was my mother's rebellion, the insistence on transforming myself is mine...All my life I've tried to get away from the void of my origin. It was the void that distressed me, that I was fleeing...Writing, I discovered a way of hiding in my characters, of escaping myself. Of undergoing one mutation after another. One could say that the mechanisms of metamorphosis is the only element of life that never changes. The journey of every individual, every country, every historical epoch, of the entire universe and all it contains, is nothing but a series of changes, at times subtle, at times deep, without which we would stand still. The moments of transitions in which something changes, constitute the backbone of all of us. Whether they are a salvation or a loss, they are moments we tend to remember. They give a structure to our existence. Almost all the rest is oblivion.

is precisely for these reasons that De Roover calls both secularism and liberalism secularised versions of Christian onto-epistemology, obscured by the employment of secularism itself as a filter to understand history. De Roover is not alone in holding this view. There are others, such as Carl L. Becker, S.J. Barnett and Elizabeth S. Hurd, who believe that at the very least the evidence to support the common assumption that the Enlightenment was a move away from Christianity towards secular reason is as far as it can get from being conclusive. That the secularisation of the Enlightenment is perhaps the consequence of a retrospective approach to history, appears to be the more plausible argument. This is because several of the leading Enlightenment thinkers were pious Christians in a society heavily committed to Christianity, whose philosophies were significantly more influenced

Our plutocracy, whether the hedge fund managers in Greenwich, Connecticut, or the Internet moguls in Palo Alto, now lives like the British did in colonial India: ruling the place but not of it. If one can afford private security, public safety is of no concern; to the person fortunate enough to own a Gulfstream jet, crumbling bridges cause less apprehension, and viable public transportation doesn’t even compute. With private doctors on call and a chartered plane to get to the Mayo Clinic, why worry about Medicare?

Partition severed economic and social links, destroying the political, ecological, and demographic balance it had taken the subcontinent hundreds of years to forge. Yet India with far greater social diversities was able to recover from the shock of partition to lay the foundations of a constitutional democracy. With a legacy of many of the same structural and ideational features of the colonial state as its counterpart, Pakistan was unable to build viable institutions that could sustain the elementary processes of a participatory democracy.

The fact that Article 1 of the Constitution expressly began with ‘India, that is Bharat.…’ to declare its roots and heritage to the world was barely known, and even if it was known, the significance of the use of ‘Bharat’ in the very first Article of the document appeared to have been lost over time.

Some have argued that as language is the medium of knowledge, that which comes in the form of language constitutes a text; since language is interpreted by the individual, the reading by the individual gives meaning to the text; therefore each time a text is read by a different individual it acquires a fresh meaning. Taken to its logical conclusion, this denies any generally accepted meaning of a text and is implicitly a denial of attempts at historical representation or claims to relative objectivity, since the meaning would change with each reading. However, the prevalent views are more subtle.

Our Constitution, which enjoins the unity and integrity of India, gave us a flying start; and equipped us adequately to meet the challenges of the future. Unfortunately, over the years, we dissipated every advantage we started with, like a compulsive gambler bent upon squandering an invaluable legacy.

India’s post-independence leadership eschewed parochial nationalism in favor of civic nationalism where the rights and privileges of being Indian were conceived as arising not from some pre-existent modes of belonging—religion, race, or ethnicity—but instead from participation in a collective political endeavor.

The Indian system of counting has been the most successful intellectual innovation ever made on our planet. It has spread and been adopted almost universally, far more extensively, even than the letters of the Phoenician alphabet which we now employ. It constitutes the nearest thing we have to a universal language…

1. Bangladesh.... In 1971 ... Kissinger overrode all advice in order to support the Pakistani generals in both their civilian massacre policy in East Bengal and their armed attack on India from West Pakistan.... This led to a moral and political catastrophe the effects of which are still sorely felt. Kissinger’s undisclosed reason for the ‘tilt’ was the supposed but never materialised ‘brokerage’ offered by the dictator Yahya Khan in the course of secret diplomacy between Nixon and China.... Of the new state of Bangladesh, Kissinger remarked coldly that it was ‘a basket case’ before turning his unsolicited expertise elsewhere.

India’s primordial nationalisms—whether expressed in language, religion, caste, or even commensality—would have pulled the country apart, as happened in several other postcolonial states, had it not been for the fact that India consciously gave itself a constitutional order that incorporated universal franchise and the rule of law; guaranteed individual rights and a federal system that promulgated separation of powers at the center and limits on the central government’s authority over the states; and established recurring elections that tested the strength of contending political parties and endowed them with the privilege of rule for limited periods of time. By adopting such a framework, India enshrined the twin components that mark all real democracies: contestation, or the peaceful struggle for power through an orderly process that confirms the preferences of the polity, and participation, or the right of all adult citizens, irrespective of wealth, gender, religion, or ethnicity, to vote for a government of their choice.

The Christian coloniser was acutely alive to the fact that language captured a culture’s journey and reflected it through its stories, idioms, proverbs and usages, which connected the speaker with the collective past. To remove traces of the past in the language of the future, native children were forbidden from speaking in their languages,20 a practice that continues in English-medium schools to this day.

There have been more thoughtful and more destructively thoughtful times than ours: times like those in which Buddha appeared, for instance, in which the people themselves, after centuries of sectarian quarrels, had sunk so deeply into the abyss of philosophical dogmas, as, from time to time, European people have done in regard to the fine points of religious dogma. European Pessimism is still in its infancy — a fact which argues against it: it has not yet attained to that prodigious and yearning fixity of sight to which it attained in India once upon a time, and in which nonentity is reflected; there is still too much of the 'ready-made,' and not enough of the 'evolved' in its constitution, too much learned and poetic Pessimism; I mean that a good deal of it has been discovered, invented, and 'created,' but not caused.

The Indian national movement is also an example of how the constitutional space offered by the existing structure could be used without getting co-opted by it. It did not completely reject this space, as such rejection in democratic societies entails heavy costs in terms of hegemonic influence and often leads to isolation — but entered it and used it effectively in combination with non-constitutional struggle to overthrow the existing structure.

I started reading the works of Pandurang Vaman Kane, Jadunath Sarkar, Radhakumud Mookerji, R.C. Majumdar, K.A. Nilakanta Sastri, K.S. Ramaswami Sastri, S.L. Bhyrappa, R. Nagaswamy, Ram Swarup, Sitaram Goel, Dharampal, Kapil Kapoor, Koenraad Elst, Michel Danino, Shrikant G. Talageri, Meenakshi Jain and Sandeep Balakrishna, apart from the publications of the Ramakrishna Mission Institute of Culture and Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan. This was, of course, in addition to the writings of Swami Vivekananda, Sri Aurobindo and other civilisational icons.

For Jinnah, Partition was a constitutional way out of a political stalemate, as he saw it, and not the beginning of a permanent state of hostility between two countries or two nations. This explains his expectation that India and Pakistan would live side by side ‘like the United States and Canada’, obviously with open borders, free flow of ideas and free trade. It is also the reason why Pakistan’s Quaid-i-Azam insisted that his Malabar Hill house in Bombay be kept as it was so that he could return to the city where he lived most of his life after retiring as Governor-General of Pakistan.

Our greatest national resource was once our self-sufficiency. We could forge our own steel, build our own cars, manufacture our own appliances, construct our own furniture, weave our own cloth—with the hands of our own workers—and were dependent on nobody else for our own survival. Can we say the same thing today? And who has benefitted from the pillaging of this greatest resource? Is it the workers who now sit idle, their jobs shipped off to India and China, while the politicians accuse them of deliberate sloth? Or is it those whose profits were maximized by exporting those jobs, and those in government whom they bribed to make doing so the law of the land?

Gandhi, claimed Ambedkar, had orally promised him that the Congress would encourage candidates from the Depressed Classes who contested in general seats, but in the absence of constitutional safeguards such promises meant nothing. Ambedkar thus wrote that he could not 'accept the assurances of the Mahatma that he and his Congress will do the needful. I cannot leave so important a question as the protection of my people to conventions and misunderstandings.' 'The Mahatma is not an immortal person....There have been many Mahatmas in India whose sole object was to remove untouchability and to elevate and absorb the Depressed Classes but every one of them have failed in their mission. Mahatmas have come and Mahatmas have gone. But untouchables have remained as untouchables'.

In fact, Hinduism�s pervading influence seems to go much earlier than Christianity. American mathematician, A. Seindenberg, has for example shown that the Sulbasutras, the ancient Vedic science of mathematics, constitute the source of mathematics in the Antic world, from Babylon to Greece : � the arithmetic equations of the Sulbasutras he writes, were used in the observation of the triangle by the Babylonians, as well as in the edification of Egyptian pyramids, in particular the funeral altar in form of pyramid known in the vedic world as smasana-cit (Seindenberg 1978: 329). In astronomy too, the "Indus" (from the valley of the Indus) have left a universal legacy, determining for instance the dates of solstices, as noted by 18th century French astronomer Jean-Sylvain Bailly : � the movement of stars which was calculated by Hindus 4500 years ago, does not differ even by a minute from the tables which we are using today". And he concludes: "the Hindu systems of astronomy are much more ancient than those of the Egyptians - even the Jews derived from the Hindus their knowledge �. There is also no doubt that the Greeks heavily borrowed from the "Indus". Danielou notes that the Greek cult of Dionysos, which later became Bacchus with the Romans, is a branch of Shivaism : � Greeks spoke of India as the sacred territory of Dionysos and even historians of Alexander the Great identified the Indian Shiva with Dionysos and mention the dates and legends of the Puranas �. French philosopher and Le Monde journalist Jean-Paul Droit, recently wrote in his book "The Forgetfulness of India" that � the Greeks loved so much Indian philosophy, that Demetrios Galianos had even translated the Bhagavad Gita �.

If Greek culture has influenced Western civilization, we must not forget that, in spite of the inestimable benefits of Greece to India, the ancient Greeks themselves were also sons of Hindu thought. As has already been mentioned, Pythagoras went to India in order to draw from the very source the principles which constituted the foundation of his doctrine and which in its turn influenced Plato, Socrates and even Aristotle to a certain degree. Apollonius of Tyanae, Plotin, did they not follow in the footprints of their predecessors, in directing themselves towards far-off India? China, Persia, Islam – the three-fourths of Asia – these civilizations which had already been influenced by the missions of Asoka, were they not attracted by India’s wisdom? That is the reason why ancient India is our Mother. In the measure that we Westerners make our intellectual and spiritual genealogy reach back to India shall we learn to love her and to consider in its true light her wisdom, the patrimony of every man.

Yet if the Marathas were violent in war, they could in times of peace be mild rulers.106 Another French traveller noted, ‘The Marathas willingly ruin the land of their enemies with a truly detestable barbarity, but they faithfully maintain the peace with their allies, and in their own domains make agriculture and commerce flourish. When seen from the outside, this style of government is terrible, as the nation is naturally prone to brigandage; but seen from the inside, it is gentle and benevolent. The areas of India which have submitted to the Marathas are the happiest and most flourishing.’107 By the early eighteenth century, the Marathas had fanned out to control much of central and western India. They were organised under five chieftains who constituted the Maratha Confederacy. These five chiefs established hereditary families which ruled over five different regions. The Peshwa – a Persian term for Prime Minister that the Bahmani Sultans had introduced in the fourteenth century – controlled Maharashtra and was head of the Confederacy, keeping up an active

In the seven weeks that it took for Longwood to be refurbished and extended, Napoleon stayed at a pretty bungalow called The Briars, closer to Jamestown, with the family of the East India Company superintendent William Balcombe, where he had one room and a pavilion in their garden.66 This period was his happiest on St Helena, not least because he struck up an unlikely, charming and innocent friendship with the second of the Balcombes’ four surviving children, Betsy, a spirited fourteen-year-old girl who spoke intelligible if ungrammatical French and to whom Napoleon behaved with avuncular indulgence. She had originally been brought up to view Napoleon, in her words, as ‘a huge ogre or giant, with one large flaming eye in the centre of his forehead, and long teeth protruding from his mouth, with which he tore to pieces and devoured little girls’, but she very soon came to adore him.67 ‘His smile, and the expression of his eye, could not be transmitted to canvas, and these constituted Napoleon’s chief charm,’ she later wrote. ‘His hair was dark brown, and as fine and silky as a child’s, rather too much so indeed for a man as its very softness caused it to look thin.’68 The friendship began when Napoleon tested Betsy on the capitals of Europe. When he asked her the capital of Russia she replied, ‘Petersburg now; Moscow formerly’, upon which ‘He turned abruptly round, and, fixing his piercing eyes full in my face, he demanded sternly, “Who burnt it?” ’ She was dumbstruck, until he laughed and said: ‘Oui, oui. You know very well that it was I who burnt it!’ Upon which the teenager corrected him: ‘I believe, sir, the Russians burnt it to get rid of the French.’69 Whereupon Napoleon laughed and friendship with ‘Mademoiselle Betsee’, ‘lettle monkee’, ‘bambina’ and ‘little scatterbrain’ was born.

ONE of the evil results of the political subjection of one people by another is that it tends to make the subject nation unnecessarily and excessively conscious of its past. Its achievements in the old great days of freedom are remembered, counted over and exaggerated by a generation of slaves, anxious to convince the world and themselves that they are as good as their masters. Slaves cannot talk of their present greatness, because it does not exist; and prophetic visions of the future are necessarily vague and unsatisfying. There remains the past. Out of the scattered and isolated facts of history it is possible to build up Utopias and Cloud Cuckoo Lands as variously fantastic as the New Jerusalems of prophecy. It is to the past — the gorgeous imaginary past of those whose present is inglorious, sordid, and humiliating — it is to the delightful founded-on-fact romances of history that subject peoples invariably turn. Thus, the savage and hairy chieftains of Ireland became in due course “the Great Kings of Leinster,” “the mighty Emperors of Meath.” Through centuries of slavery the Serbs remembered and idealised the heroes of Kossovo. And for the oppressed Poles, the mediaeval Polish empire was much more powerful, splendid, and polite than the Roman. The English have never been an oppressed nationality; they are in consequence most healthily unaware of their history. They live wholly in the much more interesting worlds of the present — in the worlds of politics and science, of business and industry. So fully, indeed, do they live in the present, that they have compelled the Indians, like the Irish at the other end of the world, to turn to the past. In the course of the last thirty or forty years a huge pseudo-historical literature has sprung up in India, the melancholy product of a subject people’s inferiority complex. Industrious and intelligent men have wasted their time and their abilities in trying to prove that the ancient Hindus were superior to every other people in every activity of life. Thus, each time the West has announced a new scientific discovery, misguided scholars have ransacked Sanskrit literature to find a phrase that might be interpreted as a Hindu anticipation of it. A sentence of a dozen words, obscure even to the most accomplished Sanskrit scholars, is triumphantly quoted to prove that the ancient Hindus were familiar with the chemical constitution of water. Another, no less brief, is held up as the proof that they anticipated Pasteur in the discovery of the microbic origin of disease. A passage from the mythological poem of the Mahabharata proves that they had invented the Zeppelin. Remarkable people, these old Hindus. They knew everything that we know or, indeed, are likely to discover, at any rate until India is a free country; but they were unfortunately too modest to state the fact baldly and in so many words. A little more clarity on their part, a little less reticence, and India would now be centuries ahead of her Western rivals. But they preferred to be oracular and telegraphically brief. It is only after the upstart West has repeated their discoveries that the modern Indian commentator upon their works can interpret their dark sayings as anticipations. On contemporary Indian scholars the pastime of discovering and creating these anticipations never seems to pall. Such are the melancholy and futile occupations of intelligent men who have the misfortune to belong to a subject race. Free men would never dream of wasting their time and wit upon such vanities. From those who have not shall be taken away even that which they have.

this nation, there was no Varna system or stratification of priest, warrior, merchant or slave by birth. As the Aryans invaded, some of the original inhabitants were assimilated within Aryan society to a degree, and they later became known as Sudras and took over the bottom rank in the social order. According to the Manu, an Aryan is a man who is not Alechcha, Dasyus, Vratya, Vahya and Sudra (each of the words have bad connotations which cannot be translated). Thus, the Aryan Invaders were able to gain power over the native inhabitants by convincing them they were born with lower standing. It is clear that the caste oppression is nothing but a concept of these invaders, and this is confirmed by Aryan literature and all the Vedas , Puranas , and Manu. Even in this modern day, one who accepts all these discriminative literatures as his holy books should consider that these beliefs were brought into India as part of a campaign to oppress. Ancient culture required that Dalits and Sudras could not enter into any temple in India because they were considered unclean, and their presence in the temple would spoil its sanctity. Dalits were not allowed to take water from the common well, to walk freely in the common streets, and anyone could assault, rape or kill them. Additionally, they could not speak in public or study in schools, and they had to work for the so called upper caste without wages. Even with all these oppressions over a few thousand years, they lived without agitating because they believed that the gods created them as slaves. Until 1950, the Puranas, Vedas, and Manu literatures supported this idea of their lowly position and legitimated antihuman doctrines.

Dropouts are only one outcome of bad quality. Poor learning outcomes, low employability of graduates, low productivity, and consequent low wages constitute another set of outcomes.

Millions of refugees from East and West Pakistan had to be found homes and gainful employment. An undeclared war was taking place in Kashmir. A new constitution had to be decided upon. Elections had to be scheduled, economic policies framed and executed.

What Savarkar envisioned in 1940 was a ‘Future Emperor of India’; what India got in a decade instead was a people’s constitution, defended by men and women who brooked no kings and shunned all empires.

Somehow, I was doubtful. It wasn’t Singh’s fault. He had done his part, following the playbook of liberal democracies across the post–Cold War world: upholding the constitutional order; attending to the quotidian, often technical work of boosting the GDP; and expanding the social safety net. Like me, he had come to believe that this was all any of us could expect from democracy, especially in big, multiethnic, multireligious societies like India and the United States. Not revolutionary leaps or major cultural overhauls; not a fix for every social pathology or lasting answers for those in search of purpose and meaning in their lives. Just the observance of rules that allowed us to sort out or at least tolerate our differences, and government policies that raised living standards and improved education enough to temper humanity’s baser impulses. Except now I found myself asking whether those impulses—of violence, greed, corruption, nationalism, racism, and religious intolerance, the all-too-human desire to beat back our own uncertainty and mortality and sense of insignificance by subordinating others—were too strong for any democracy to permanently contain. For they seemed to lie in wait everywhere, ready to resurface whenever growth rates stalled or demographics changed or a charismatic leader chose to ride the wave of people’s fears and resentments. And as much as I might have wished otherwise, there was no Mahatma Gandhi around to tell me what I might do to hold such impulses back.

The Assembly finally arrived at a compromise; that ‘the official language of the Union shall be Hindi in the Devanagari script’; but for ‘fifteen years from the commencement of the Constitution, the English language shall continue to be used for all the official purposes of the Union for which it was being used immediately before such commencement’.59 Till 1965, at any rate, the notes and proceedings of the courts, the services, and the all-India bureaucracy would be conducted in English.

Constitutional morality is not a natural sentiment. It has to be cultivated. We must realise that our people have yet to learn it. Democracy in India is only a top-dressing on an Indian soil which is essentially undemocratic”.65

When a citizen challenged a particular piece of legislation it was the duty of the Supreme Court to state whether the legislation was right or wrong. If the courts did not know what their function was, there would be dictatorship. While law was necessary for the upkeep of society, equally essential were courts to determine whether the legislature passed the law within the written word of the Constitution.4

Somehow, I was doubtful. It wasn’t Singh’s fault. He had done his part, following the playbook of liberal democracies across the post–Cold War world: upholding the constitutional order; attending to the quotidian, often technical work of boosting the GDP; and expanding the social safety net. Like me, he had come to believe that this was all any of us could expect from democracy, especially in big, multiethnic, multireligious societies like India and the United States. Not revolutionary leaps or major cultural overhauls; not a fix for every social pathology or lasting answers for those in search of purpose and meaning in their lives. Just the observance of rules that allowed us to sort out or at least tolerate our differences, and government policies that raised living standards and improved education enough to temper humanity’s baser impulses.

But the unique position of Kashmir was not limited to the terms of its Constitution. Kashmir had become the bivouac of a vast assembly of Indian Military and Air Force personnel, who have now for nearly twenty years constantly and at most street corners stood guard against possible second thoughts by the legislatures and the Government of Kashmir on the integration of the State with the Indian Union. Democracy in Kashmir is thus underlined at all times in form and substance by the arms of the Indian army.

Thus access to education, which was virtually impeded in T.M.A. Pai, was somewhat restored in view of three factors: (1) Article 15(5) of the Constitution, which was inserted by the 93rd Constitution Amendment Act; and (2) the RTE Act 2009 and (3) the Supreme Court judgment in Society for Unaided Private Schools, which upheld the RTE Act 2009.

This could be because in the geography of origin of decolonial thought, namely the Americas, colonised societies have become almost entirely Christian. In other words, the preoccupation of decolonial scholarship with race and its reluctance to address religion with the same degree of candour may be attributed to the fact that the regions that have produced much of the scholarship on coloniality so far, follow the religion of the coloniser, namely Christianity. Their demographic reality, perhaps, offers an explanation as to their gaze being more alive to race than to religion, since reclaiming their indigenous religious identities may seem impossible despite having embarked on their decolonial journeys. Given the huge Christian settler colonial populations in the Americas in particular, the numbers may not even be conducive for indigenous peoples even if they wanted to revert to the faith of their ancestors. And if this were not enough, pragmatic considerations, such as the highly organised and evangelical nature of Christianity and its status as a global majority, have a direct and real bearing on the ability of any erstwhile non-Christian colonised society to reclaim and return to its roots.

Fundamental Duties: Respect the Constitution, National Flag, and National Anthem. Follow the good ideas that helped India become free. Protect the unity and safety of India. Defend the country and help the country when needed. Get along with all people in India, irrespective of their differences. Stand up against practices that harm women's dignity. Value and preserve India's diverse culture and history. Protect the environment and be kind to animals. Think scientifically and be curious about learning new things. Take care of public property, and do not use violence. Always try to do your best and help the country succeed.

the installation of Congress ministries in six large provinces of British India was a major milestone in the constitutional history of the subcontinent. Much more power had devolved on to the shoulder of Indians than at any previous time in the history of the Raj. Indeed, since precolonial regimes were themselves devoid of democratic representation, and were run by unelected kings who nominated their ministers, this was the furthest that Indians had thus far got in the direction of self-rule, swaraj. Surely it was now only a matter of years before the Congress, and India, achieved the next step, of Dominion Status, thus to place themselves on par with Canada, Australiaand South Africa. A sign of how much of a departure from colonial practice these elections were is underlined in a humble office order issued by the Central Provinces government after their own Congress ministry was installed. It was signed by an Indian ICS officer, C.M. Trivedi, then serving as the secretary to the general administration department. The order was sent to all commissioners and deputy commissioners, the chief conservator of forests, the inspector general of police, all secretaries to government, and a host of other senior officials (including the military secretary and the governor), almost all of whom were, of course, British. The text of the order was short and simple, albeit, in the eyes of its recipients, not altogether sweet. It read: ‘In future Mr. Gandhi should be referred to in all correspondence as “Mahatma Gandhi”.

Whenever I attempt to understand the Pakistani military’s Inter-Services Intelligence and the civilian Intelligence Bureau, whose purpose is to collect crucial information on the security of the state, I am left with biting questions about their true roles in internal and external matters. It is a fact that such countries as India and Pakistan have always suffered from a lack of limits on the role of their intelligence agencies and respect for international law and human rights, including the privacy of individuals within the concept and context of global peace and fundamental freedoms. The ISI, driven by the Pakistan Armed Forces, ignores the supreme constitutional role and rule of a democratic head of state, under which even the Armed Forces themselves fall. This is not only a violation of the constitution but also a rejection of the civilian leadership. This can be interpreted as Pakistan is a country where the servant rules its leader and patron. It is this bitter reality that leads toward the collapse of all systems of society, which the Pakistani nation has faced since the first introduction of martial law by General Ayub Khan in 1958, and such conduct has continued to exist ever since, whether visibly or invisibly. One cannot ignore, avoid, or deny that Pakistan has maintained its physical independence for more than 7 decades. However, its real freedom as conceptualized upon the nation’s creation has been only a dream and abused by its so-called defenders and its power-mongers. Unfortunately, such figures control the ISI and lead it in the wrong direction, beyond the constitutional limits of its power. Consequently, the ISI plays the role of a gang that disrupts the stability of the main political parties and promotes tiny, unpopular parties to gain power for itself. There is thus no doubt that the ISI has failed in its responsibility to support constitutional rule and to secure and defend the state and its people. The failure of the democratic system in the country, directly or indirectly, reflects the harassment practiced by both intelligence agencies without proof or legal process, even interfering with other institutions. The consequences are the collapse of the justice system and the imposition of foreign policies that damage international relationships. The result is a lack of trust in these agencies and their isolation. In a civilized century, it is a tragedy that one dares not express one’s feelings that may abuse God, prophets, or sacred figures. But more than that, one cannot speak a word against the wrongdoing of a handful of army generals or ISI officials. In Pakistan, veteran journalists, top judges, and other key figures draw breath under the spying eyes of the ISI; even higher and minister-level personalities are the victims of such conduct. One has to live in such surroundings. Pakistan needs a major cleanup and reorganization of the present awkward role of the ISI for the sake of international relations, standards, and peace, including the privacy of individuals and respect for the notable figures of society, according to the law.

Wherever there is a written Constitution, the Supreme law is the law of the Constitution and for even the Parliament to accept that its powers are limited by the written Constitution is not in any manner to derogate from its sovereignty but only to accept that its sovereignty, like the sovereignty of the executive and the judiciary, is limited by the written Constitution.

The amendments proposed are in respect of Article 14 guaranteeing equality before the law, Article 15 prohibiting discrimination on grounds of religion, Article 19 guaranteeing certain personal rights of the citizen such as freedom of speech, Article 31 relating to compulsory acquisition of private property and Article 32 regarding the right to move the Supreme Court for the enforcement of fundamental rights. Amendments to the Constitution became necessary as judicial interpretations of fundamental rights created difficulties in the execution of the policy of the Government

any special concessions can be made only for really backward classes of citizens and solely on that ground and not on the ground of equal distribution for all communities or on a basis of rationing for the several communities.’18

Too many dictatorships have been reared in the sacred name of public order,’ warned the commentator, ‘and to leave the interpretation of this term to the tender mercies of officialdom is to barter away a precious privilege.

It has become a matter of great distress to me to see from day to day some of these newssheets which are full of vulgarity and indecency and falsehood, day after day, not injuring me or this House much, but poisoning the mind of the younger generation, degrading their mental integrity and moral standards. It is not for me a political problem but a moral problem. How are we to save our younger generation from this progressive degradation and the progressive poisoning of their mind and spirit?

Mr Nehru’s sentiment was more than outmatched by the impassioned logic of Dr Mookerjee.’99

Thus, if the government tells you that you can't hold a sign which says 'Please elect Mr. X', you could invoke your fundamental right to free speech and challenge the government's decision. However, if your private employer threatens to dismiss you from service if you hold up a sign which says so, you cannot invoke the fundamental right to free speech, because such rights are only available against the government and its instrumentalities.

Colonisation, as understood by scholars, refers to a process or phenomenon by which people belonging to a nation establish colonies in other societies while retaining their bonds with the parent nation, and exploit the colonised societies to benefit the parent nation and themselves. Simply put, the process of establishing colonies is called colonisation and the policy of using colonisation to increase one’s footprint is called colonialism.

it is evident that the two-way relationship between corruption and black income generation constitutes a central problem of India’s political economy.

Until a decolonial approach is employed by experts and ‘intellectuals’, we will continue to see the entrenchment of colonialised identities and fissures, which began with an anti-Brahmin slant but whose rapid movement towards an anti-Dharmic/anti-Hindu position is less veiled with each passing day—thereby revealing the end goal of European coloniality.

Thus, the fact that Tilak was writing in Marathi was taken to mean that his audience was ignorant and unintelligent. This was a recurring theme in the sedition cases. Interestingly, one commentator in 1898 wrote in the Law Quarterly Review in England that Tilak's influence was likely to be 'wider than the number of copies printed' because 'it appears to be customary for Hindoos to gather round the village schoolmaster and listen while he reads the news.

Tilak's case had attracted a great deal of attention and a large number of Indian journalists had gathered in the courtroom to witness the proceedings, but there was insufficient chairs for all of them to be seated. It is said that when they took this matter up with the clerk of the crown, the official remarked that they should all take their seats in the dock, i.e. alongside Tilak as criminals.

The lieutenant governor said that in India it would be impossible to accept the English Law test of direct incitement to violence. He added that educated Indians who were unable to find jobs had become 'discontented, disobedient, and sometimes troublesome young men' who had taken to engaging in seditious writings. Adapting Caliban's speech from Shakespeare's The Tempest, he said: 'We taught them language, and their profit on it is, they know how to curse.

Truth Immaterial: It was no defence for a person accused of sedition to argue that what he had said was true. Quoting an Irish judge, Justice Mookerjee of the Calcutta High Court in one case held, 'the greater the truth, the greater the libel'.

Evidence for the Spoken Word: A person could be convicted for delivering a seditious speech (as opposed to writing a seditious article) on the basis of notes of the speech prepared by police officers who were present at the time the speech was delivered.

In other words, while Bal Gangadhar Tilak in 1898 could not be arrested for sedition by a police officer without an order from a magistrate, Kanhaiya Kumar (who, of course, is no Tilak) in 2016 could be arrested for sedition without any such order. It is not an oppressive colonial regime which has imposed this new restriction on the freedom of speech in India, but a democratic one which has done so.

Sen informed the House that he had initially intended to speak in Hindi, but since 'most of the challenge came from areas whose representatives might not have understood Hindi,' he had decided to speak in English instead.

A member from Assam said that 'there is less affinity among the different peoples in India than among the different nations of Europe', because while European countries could at least 'claim the same pigment of their skin' and 'the same religion throughout the length and breadth of Europe', India was a country 'with a bewildering, often conflicting varieties of people, of languages, of sects, of faiths, of colours, of nationalities, of races' which could not make similar claims.

Some said that rather than making piecemeal amendments to the Constitution, a committee should be constituted to suggest comprehensive changes to be made to the Constitution once and for all. Citing a paper published by a senior researcher at the Indian Law Institute, H.N. Mukherjee said that words like 'sovereignty' and 'integrity' were vague and were susceptible to being misinterpreted by courts. H.V. Kamath cited the example of the Scottish Home Rule Party which was permitted to contest elections for seats in the House of Commons, and said that only speech which amounts to incitement ought to be outlawed.

Ye, can merely showing a map depicting the de facto line of control in an internationally disputed geographical region amount to undermining the 'sovereignty and integrity of India'? By merely presenting an alternate map of Kashmir to its readers, could The Economist be said to have engaged in activity akin to the DMK's demands for secession and for the separate state of Tamilnad, which gave rise to the Sixteenth Amendment in the first place? Can it even amount to 'questioning' the territorial integrity of India, punishable as an offence under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act? At a more fundamental level, can a person who merely questions the territorial boundaries of India be said to be undermining the 'sovereignty and integrity of India' at a level comparable with the movements in Madras, Nagaland and Punjab in the 1950s and 1960s?

Yet, can merely showing a map depicting the de facto line of control in an internationally disputed geographical region amount to undermining the 'sovereignty and integrity of India'? By merely presenting an alternate map of Kashmir to its readers, could The Economist be said to have engaged in activity akin to the DMK's demands for secession and for the separate state of Tamilnad, which gave rise to the Sixteenth Amendment in the first place? Can it even amount to 'questioning' the territorial integrity of India, punishable as an offence under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act? At a more fundamental level, can a person who merely questions the territorial boundaries of India be said to be undermining the 'sovereignty and integrity of India' at a level comparable with the movements in Madras, Nagaland and Punjab in the 1950s and 1960s?

The law thus believed that those who read Indian language newspapers were 'ignorant and unintelligent', and that by contrast, only those who were capable of reading English language newspapers were informed and intelligent.

Many members of the Assembly were disappointed with the numerous exceptions which had been created against each of the freedoms set out in the right to freedom, including the right to free speech. For instance, K.T. Shah said that 'what is given by one right hand seems to be taken away by three or four or five left hands, and therefore the article is rendered nugatory in my opinion.' Lakshmi Narayan Sahi cited an Oriya proverb which translates as follows: 'It is no use making a house with so small entrance that one's entry into the house is rendered difficult without striking his head against the door frame.

It is important to remember that in the middle of the twentieth century, when several colonised societies attained ‘independence’, the focus of the ‘civilised world’ suddenly fell on the ‘poverty' of the ‘Third World’. It was conveniently forgotten that this impoverished situation of the Third World was a direct consequence of centuries of colonisation. Instead, decolonisation engendered a new talking point, namely that the newly formed ‘nation-states’ must ‘catch up’ with the West by focusing on ‘development’ the European way.

Rest of the world was not living in the Dark Ages before Pax Europaea or European Peace, and will certainly not plunge into ignorance and darkness after the demise of Pax Europaea. Therefore, it is time to discard the idea that the rest of the world is the Christian White Man’s burden.

K.R. Malkani,63 the dedicated editor of the Organiser (who would go on to achieve the dubious honour of becoming the first man to be arrested during the Emergency), however, was not to be cowed. In the very next issue, he defiantly wrote: To threaten the liberty of the press for the sole offence of non-conformity to official view in each and every matter, may be a handy tool for tyrants but (is) only a crippling curtailment of civil liberties in a free democracy . . . A government can always learn more from bona fide criticism of independent thinking citizens than the fulsome flattery of charlatans.64

There is a strange fear in the minds of some that Parliament might misbehave and therefore should not have too much power given to it.

Critically, the pursuit of economic prosperity through the mere imitation of a Western framework, according to me, would cement the notion that the only viable way was the Western way, which would have irreversible and catastrophic consequences for the survival of Bharat’s indigeneity. I believed that it would be unwise to put economics and civilisational priorities in walled gardens because the relationship between the two was too close to risk a silo-based approach. After all, the average person was bound to assume and attribute the West’s economic prosperity to the values and ideals it subscribed to, and ultimately to its onto-epistemology and theology (OET).

education constitutes empowerment, then most middle-class women in India have willingly allowed themselves to be disempowered in exchange for what are essentially some frivolous freedoms. They have resignedly convinced themselves to abandon their own dreams and career aspirations to cater to the demands at home.

In India, in the aftermath of the bloodbath of the Partition massacres that spread across the subcontinent at the time of independence from British rule and the creation of the states of India and Pakistan—Hindus massacred by Muslims, Muslims by Hindus, somewhere between one and two million people dead—another group of founding fathers, led by Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, resolved that the only way to ensure peace in India was to remove religion from the public sphere. The new Constitution of India was therefore wholly secular in language and intention, and that has endured until the present moment, when the current administration seeks to undermine those secular foundations, discredit those founders, and create an overtly religious, majoritarian Hindu state.

Section 3 of the state constitution that came into effect from 26 January 1957 says, “The State of J&K is and shall be an integral part of the Union of India”. Section 147 of the State Constitution says that this Section is not amendable.

Therefore, the Burmese felt no particular urge to understand their colonial rulers. This indifference was also encouraged by British attitudes. While the Englishman tended to see the Hindus as ‘serious’, ‘mysterious’, ‘deep’, ‘introverted’, and so on, he usually saw the Burmese as ‘gay’, ‘open’, ‘careless’, ‘childlike’, not a people who needed deep philosophical interpretation. The Burmese returned the compliment by assuming that there was not much that they needed to know about the Englishman beyond the necessities of unavoidable intercourse between the ruler and the ruled. How different it was from India, with the earnest, almost obsessive desire for comprehension at the intellectual level that was producing a string of scholars and philosophers in the western mould! It was true that such Indians constituted only a tiny section of the population, but their impact was strong on the upper classes; and they set the tone for those who would be leaders in the independence movements that were to gather momentum in the twentieth century. II

All the reforms like absence of caste division, freedom of religion, education of women, late marriages, widow remarriage, a system of divorce, on which some good people of India are in the habit of harping ad nauseam as constituting a condition precedent to the introduction of political reforms in India, had already been in actual practice in the province of Burma. But there was not evident among the Burmese a feeling for their religion, their country or their trade to a degree expected of them. Therefore we can conclude that there is no inherent connection between social reform and national regeneration. Some European writers have sought to advise us to bring about social reform as a preparation for political reform. But it is human nature that this piece of precept should stand suspect till we see with our own eyes what kind of political reform is given to Burma which is socially in a position to deserve it.13 Tilak

Forget and forgive the pastime. Each one of us should unite in the name of humanity, love, harmony and peace. The boundary walls, execute not the problems and damage. However, if one cannot open that, one may open the lack of heart, mind, and eyes, which constitutes only the hatred and enmity, for nothing. India and Pakistan should feel and remove such evil elements from its agencies that hinder to peace, and welfare of both sides people. No one will help if one cannot decide, and encourage the peace and love. Each one of us should realise the speed of the world; it is time, to feed, educate and save the people, not to kill them for hatred or evil purposes.

Article 73 of the Constitution clearly stipulates that, subject to the Constitution, the executive power of the union shall extend to matters in respect of which Parliament has the power to make laws. Article 162 of the Constitution subjects the executive power of the state to the same limitations. The executive power is thus coterminous with legislative power. That is why it is said in all representative democracies that the government is one of laws and not of men.

I revisited Raigarh exactly twenty years later,’ he said. ‘I was amazed at the devastation I saw, the extent to which it has been exploited. It symbolizes the whole question of what constitutes development and who benefits. There was one imagination of government when I joined the civil services in 1980; there was no doubt that the theory of government was that its primary duty was towards the poor and the disadvantaged. There were lots of deviations from that ideal, but then they were perceived and recognized as deviations from that ideal.