Pramathanath Sastry comments in a post of Balasubramanian Anantharaman on his Facebook wall.
The premise that the design of the constitution is such that terrible things were inevitable. Constitutions are always imperfect documents. And it is applied on the ground via interpretations. I don’t even know where to begin regarding your statement. Suggests because we are not a confederation it is all unnatural and hence this pox upon us. (Wake up and smell the coffee; every codification, every constitution, is in the end unnatural.) That certain high culture stuff like Bheeshma in Yudha Parva not being in the document or Ain-e-akbari not being in the document is the reason for the horrors visited upon us. Cynical me knows that the US constitution was interpreted in very different ways at different times without any amendments to the constitution. And that no document can cover the edges of the self perception of a nation (Manipur). In the end it is us who are the problem. Our bigotry. The churning. The centripetal forces towards the centre and the centrifugal forces (Kashmir, Manipur), no document could have taken care of them. Good people could have. A generous liberal people could have. Those are independent of the various constitutions which are possible from a broadly liberal menu. Sedition is not in the constitution. Article 372 which says that any existing law in the IPC would continue to be in force until modified, is why sedition is in the law books. The IPC could have easily been modified without amending the constitution. I am not defending the constitution. I just find this belief that it, not society, is the root cause just a bunch of nonsense. It could have been interpreted a million ways. But judges, ministers, policeman, are from our society and that whole thingamajig has a certain direction today. It is us. Rather than seeing a mismatch between the society and the constitution, I see actually a movement towards a match with the views of the dominant, something all judicial and political systems manage. The brief liberal court of the US (30 years at best in 245 years) was an anomaly.
The premise that the design of the constitution is such that terrible things were inevitable. Constitutions are always imperfect documents. And it is applied on the ground via interpretations. I don’t even know where to begin regarding your statement. Suggests because we are not a confederation it is all unnatural and hence this pox upon us. (Wake up and smell the coffee; every codification, every constitution, is in the end unnatural.) That certain high culture stuff like Bheeshma in Yudha Parva not being in the document or Ain-e-akbari not being in the document is the reason for the horrors visited upon us. Cynical me knows that the US constitution was interpreted in very different ways at different times without any amendments to the constitution. And that no document can cover the edges of the self perception of a nation (Manipur). In the end it is us who are the problem. Our bigotry. The churning. The centripetal forces towards the centre and the centrifugal forces (Kashmir, Manipur), no document could have taken care of them. Good people could have. A generous liberal people could have. Those are independent of the various constitutions which are possible from a broadly liberal menu. Sedition is not in the constitution. Article 372 which says that any existing law in the IPC would continue to be in force until modified, is why sedition is in the law books. The IPC could have easily been modified without amending the constitution. I am not defending the constitution. I just find this belief that it, not society, is the root cause just a bunch of nonsense. It could have been interpreted a million ways. But judges, ministers, policeman, are from our society and that whole thingamajig has a certain direction today. It is us. Rather than seeing a mismatch between the society and the constitution, I see actually a movement towards a match with the views of the dominant, something all judicial and political systems manage. The brief liberal court of the US (30 years at best in 245 years) was an anomaly.
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