Is India Living Up to Its Constitution?

To delve into the answer of the question that is India living up to its constitution? It’s a pre-requisite to understand How and why our constitution came into existence? The tedious journey of the birth of Indian constitution drives us to the state of acknowledgement that it is not a mere book of ordinary pages, rather it is a testimony of the meticulous discussions and deliberations by the highbrows of our country, their zenith of spirit to let the India loom in all the shades of freedom resulted the birth of our constitution. The ravages of time surrendered and the rays of independence began illuminating Hindustan, the need was sensed by the intelligentsia of that time to form a constituent assembly in 1946 for providing a forum to the diverse opinions to muster and yield the most reasonable laws for ruling. The iconic constitution that is entitled as the longest constitution of the world took a painstaking phase, where different representatives from all walks of life hammered on different segments that demands the proper formulation of laws.

Why it is important to live up to its constitution? It is crucial to corroborate this question to erect a wall of faith towards the constitution. Every nation is replete with its own geography, ethnicity, culture, demography etc, with a pure intent to run a nation in a best possible harmonious way becomes the responsibility of the government and to abide by the certain set of fair laws becomes the duty of the citizens, the collective contributions make the particular nation bask in bliss. Our constitution is a herald of a peaceful country where the gender is not supposed to override the dignity of women, where the religion is not supposed to override the identity of minorities, where caste is not supposed to override the self-esteem of Dalits, where perpetrator’s identity is not supposed to override the constitution laws, this must be amplifying the current scenario and its lament. That’s not wrong to pay heed at, our mind pops up the right incidents after giving a read to the aforementioned text.

The cohesive nature of our constitution has retooled a new challenge in front of the audience, the way in which constitution is deciphered pump up a confronting debate on the specific law which is knitted by claiming itself to be a constitutional one but its odour becomes unconstitutional. The bigots often distort some segments of constitution for fulfilling their urge of favouritism.

That causes a fatality to our constitution. Past adjudication on many cases has witnessed the breach of the essence of the constitution for the sake of favouring a particular community, to substantiate this we have the array of judgements like when Supreme Court observes that all insults to persons belonging to Dalit or tribal communities will not be considered an offence under the SC/ST [Prevention of Atrocities Act] the breach of constitutional essence occur here because Art. 15 guarantees the protection to all the citizens, MP High Court gives conditional Bail to sexual offender on getting Rakhi tied by his victim which was the violation of Sec. 376 of Indian constitution as the punishment assigned to this crime is not endorsed to be nullified by any such act by Victim,  Under UAPA many journalists paid for exercising their freedom of speech which is entitled to all the citizens under art. 19 ,  Judgement passed by Bombay H.C that sexual assault under POCSO needs skin to skin contact that infringe the POCSO Act which clearly enlist all types of sexual offences as punishable as the malicious intention and an attempt to harass is a initial step before it turns into a gruesome crime that is rape, the another despondent incident is of unfair treatments with the Kashmiri journalists that clearly infringes the art.14.

The above portrait of incidents is the befitting answer of the ticklish question that – Is India living up to its constitution? which is not merely a question but a mirror into the reality of the contemporary time. It is fledging the citizens to realize that the time is compelling them to embrace the constitutional literacy along with the ventures they are pursuing. The code of conduct of our own country is losing its core before the entire distortion of this constitution prevails, citizens are anticipated by the forebears of our constitution to get awakened and act as the shield of this memento of independence.