REWIND
New Delhi, 1 March 2024
Constitution
Review
A
JUVENILE CONTROVERSY
By Inder Jit
(Released on 6 March
2000)
India faces and has faced in the post-Nehru era many
crises mainly on one score. It has lots and lots of politicians, but very few
statesman. While a politician merely thinks of today, a statesman also thinks
of tomorrow. But the situation has greatly worsened in India over the years.
Sadly, most Indian politicians do not think of the whole day any more. They
only think of the moment and live for the moment --- and talk about yesterday,
not tomorrow.
This has made most of our politicians brazenly
opportunistic. Self is unabashedly placed before the country and power
exploited for personal ends. There is little attempt among most of them to
educate and inform themselves. Mere literacy is mistaken for knowledge and
wisdom. Few care to remember that a parliamentary democracy is a civilised form
of Government based on discussion, debate and consensus. Consequently, the
Opposition ignores its positive role and acts as though its only job is to
oppose.
These thoughts are prompted by a wholly unnecessary and
indeed a juvenile controversy which erupted when the President, K.R. Narayanan,
surprisingly chose valour to discretion and publicly expressed his strong
reservations against the NDA Government’s decision to set up a Constitution
Review Commission in accordance with its election manifesto. Sadly, the wrangle
has continued, fanned by unbelievable ignorance on all sides. Hardly a day
passes when the Opposition does not denounce the exercise as politically
motivated, machiavellian and designed to “saffronise” and undermine the
democratic Constitution. In fact, Sonia Gandhi has led in New Delhi a Congress
rally to protest against the review and other policies of the Vajpayee
Government.
We need to ask a few questions. Is the Congress
justified in its opposition to the review? The answer is an emphatic no. In
fact, it would have talked differently if Sonia Gandhi and her aides on the one
hand, and the powers that be and their advisers on the other were not
ignoramuses. Even as Congressmen object mindlessly to a
review of the Constitution after a reasonable span of 50 years, they are
blissfully unaware that Jawaharlal Nehru had got the Congress Working Committee
to set up a 10-member Committee on 4 April 1954 under his own Chairmanship “to
study the question of changes in the Constitution and the Representation of
People Act and to suggest amendments” in the light of difficulties experienced
by the Centre and the State Governments. That was just four years after the
Constitution came into effect!
Indira Gandhi next set up a Congress panel, headed by
Swaran Singh, in 1976 to take a good, fresh look at the Constitution and make
whatever recommendations it considered necessary for stability, development and
the well-being and happiness of the masses. It was even permitted to go into
the question whether India should continue with the Westminster model or switch
over to the presidential form of Government. That the panel favoured the former
is another matter.
The Swaran Singh panel also went into the bar imposed
by the Supreme Court on Parliament in the Kesavanand Bharati case against amending
the basic structure of the Constitution. He proposed that Parliament’s
supremacy in the matter be restored by providing that the Constitutional
amendments made by it “shall not be called into question in any court on any
ground.” The idea was, however, dropped when top legal experts cautioned that
the Constitution could well become a book of contradictions if Parliament was
allowed unlimited power to amend and upset the delicate equilibrium between the
executive, the legislature and the judiciary.
Top Congress leaders are presently talking ad näuseum
of the “basic structure” of the Constitution and how
Parliament is barred from changing it. Yet they (and even Government
leaders and their aides) are unaware that Indira Gandhi rubbished the concept
in the Lok Sabha on 27 October 1976. She said: “Revision
and adjustment in changing conditions are part and parcel of our Constitution. Those
who want to fix it in a rigid and unalterable frame do not know the spirit of
our Constitution and are entirely out of tune with the spirit of new India...
We have always maintained that Parliament has an unfettered, unqualified and
unbridgeable right to amend the Constitution. We do not accept the dogma of
basic structure!”
That is not all. At one stage Indira Gandhi even toyed
with the idea of setting up a Constituent Assembly to ensure that the Constitutional
amendments she favoured did not run into difficulty with the Supreme Court
because of the Kesavanand Bharati case. But she dropped the move once it was
pointed out that a proposal mooted in the Constituent Assembly for providing
for such a body was turned down by the Founding Fathers. Expert opinion
eventually persuaded Indira Gandhi to get Parliament to amend the Constitution
as Parliament on the ground that “there is something bigger than all of us,
that is the nation and the future.”
In my opinion, the review has not come a day too soon.
In fact, the demand for a fresh look at the Constitution has grown with each
passing year in preference to hasty ad hoc amendments totalling 70. Way back on
31 March 1974, I raised the issue nationally through a cover story in the
Illustrated Weekly, then India's leading magazine edited by Khushwant Singh,
fervently pleading for effective steps “to stop the slideback to a feudal, sham
democracy.” A welcome and heart-warming endorsement came from Loknayak
Jayaprakash Narayan who wrote from Patna: “I congratulate you on your article
on the erosion of democracy in our country.”
Another question. Can the BJP use the review to subvert
democracy and saffronise the Constitution? No way, even if it so wanted. The
BJP, indeed the NDA, lacks the strength both in the Lok Sabha and in the Rajya
Sabha to get any Constitutional amendment adopted. An amendment of the
Constitution requires to be passed “by a majority of the total membership of
the House and by a majority of not less than two-thirds of the members of that
House present and voting.” The NDA has 303 members in the Lok Sabha with a
strength of 545. It has only 84 members in the Rajya Sabha with a strength of
245. Furthermore, such an amendment has to be ratified “by the legislatures of
not less than one-half of the States. This is well nigh impossible at present.
No less astonishing and absurd are some recent
statements made by top leaders, who should know, better (or be better advised)
before speaking. Former Prime Minister Chandra Shekhar reportedly criticised
the Vajpayee Government the other day for “by passing” Parliament in regard to
the Constitution Review Commission. Sonia Gandhi, for her part, said the
Vajpayee Government appeared to be in “a great hurry to rewrite India’s
Constitution” and added: “they have not even bothered to take Parliament into
confidence.”
Yet, as we all know President Narayanan informed the
first session of both Houses of Parliament on 25 October 1999: “A Commission
comprising noted constitutional experts and public figures will be appointed to
study a half-century’s experience of the Constitution and make suitable
recommendations to meet the challenges of the next country.”
Finally, would the proposed review then
prove to be pointless and futile? Once again, the answer is an emphatic no. The exercise would still be most useful so long as it
tells us “whether it is the Constitution that has failed us or whether we have
failed the Constitution” -- and what needs to be done. The Swaran Singh
panel came out strongly against any change in the parliamentary system. But it
failed to tell us what precisely had gone wrong with the system as practised in
India and what might be done to get it to function in a clean, smooth and
effective way. Democracy, after all, is only a means to an end. Ultimately, it
must deliver and serve the best interest, welfare and happiness of our people.—INFA
(Copyright, India
News & Feature Alliance)
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