Key Points
New Delhi: The Constitution of India should not be treated as a holy book and worshipped, it should instead be engaged with, said Arghya Sengupta, founder of Delhi-based think tank Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy, while discussing his book The Colonial Constitution, Friday...
The Constitution needs to be engaged with and its contents need to be critiqued and that is the spirit with which I have approached this book, he said during the discussion which also had senior advocate Fali S. Nariman and was chaired by ThePrint Editor-in-Chief Shekhar Gupta...
Introducing the book and speaking about the Constitution, Shekhar Gupta said, Everybody had expected in 1947, that India is an artificial construct, that it will break upIf India has stayed together and has become stronger over these decades, unlike every other new Republic that broke up a lot of the credit goes to this Constitution...
We should, therefore, improve ourselves and not the Constitution, he said.. Asked about parts of the Constitution that may be outdated now, Nariman said, I dont know about outdated, but there is a theory about the Constitution that they only last about 20 odd yearsOurs probably will last, and I hope it will last because it is only this document, in my view, that keeps the country together whether you have a new Constitution or you dont...
And it is because the very idea of a Parliamentary form of government, like that of Great Britains, was something that inspired 19th-century nationalists like Bal Gangadhar Tilak and 20th-century Indian nationaliststo demand from Great Britain a Constitution, along with a Bill of Rights, just as the English had in Britain, he said.. Nariman also pointed out that sedition still survives in India...
