Constitution OF INDIA And Pendency of Court Cases: Review

Constitution OF INDIA And Pendency of Court Cases: Review

FPJ BureauUpdated: Thursday, May 30, 2019, 09:28 AM IST
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CONSTITUTION OF INDIA And Pendency of Court Cases

R.C. Aggarwal

KBC-Nano Publication Pvt Ltd: 2016

Pages. 382

Rs. 495

This is a collection of 32 essays purportedly on various aspects of the Constitution of India, twelve of which have been contributed by Mr. R. C. Aggarwal, the author-editor of the book under review. The collection is led by late Justice Krishna Iyer’s essay titled: A Malady for which Mahatma is The Remedy.The essays are preceded by a section containing “Messages” from well-wishers which include Dr. Manmohan Singh and some chief ministers, a few judges and advocates.

The Preface gives an idea of what is to follow: a rather rambling search for various points of view on the Constitution. Aggarwal surprisingly credits the inspiration for the book from a non-professional who says that the Constitution can’t do any welfare of this country and hence it should be thrown into a well. We are yet to see any book on the practice of medicine cure all the people of the world or a book on civil / structural engineering that has saved the world from earthquakes. What is in these books has to be implemented by flesh-and-blood humans who need to have the will (political or whatever) to use those provisions. On the contrary, Aggarwal’s own observations in his essays included in the present collection do not have any such pejoratives with reference to the Constitution, though in the Preface, he quotes a senior advocate of the supreme court saying that the Constitution is almost a carbon copy of the “hated Government of India Act, 1935”; that it is “remarkable for its ambiguous, foggy, inefficient, pompous, slow-motion, unaccountable and wasteful executive …”.Are we negating the well-acknowledged and superbly documented stupendous efforts of the Constituent Assembly? Those of us who have pledged allegiance to the Constitution would tend to fear – as did Joseph Story, the 19th century jurist and author Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States: “[The Constitution] may, nevertheless, perish in an hour by the folly, negligence of it only keepers, THE PEOPLE” . If “The People” are its keepers, lawyers judges, particularly those in the higher echelons, are its authorised conscience-keepers – and The People cannot afford to have them swayed in their commitment to the Constitution by political and/or other considerations or even by the views of non-professionals with their respective sets of blinkers.

The author-editor has included some essays written by him on subjects like the steps to be taken to save Rs.40 lakh crores annually, how to get back some Rs.700 lakh crores of black money in India and abroad; there is an article by him about the temple in Tirupathi and about a spice called Tiruphala. Perhaps in a roundabout way there is a connection of all this with the Constitution of India – but that has not been explained by him at any stage. The publishers need to improve their proofreading department: punctuation marks are used literally at random and sentences “hang” from paragraphs that are split with careless abandon.

Some of the articles are worth reading though. Directive Principles by Prof (Dr) Rajni Malhotra Dhingra of the Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University and the two articles by Dr. N. Satish Gowda of Bangalore University, viz. Constitutional Perspective on Right to Food in Indiaand Judicial Directions to Police Officials for Protection of Rights of Women. Then theessay onEnforcement of Constitutional Law in Indian Democracyby Dr. L. Chandrakanthi of Bangalore University and Position Property Right under the Constitution after 44th Amendmentby Dr. Janhavi S.S. of the Karnataka State Open University also make for interesting reading. The article by Beverly Baines of Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada about Polygamy and Feminist Constitutionalism in Canada seems completely out of context in the present selection; but the one by Benjamin L. Berger (of York University, Toronto, Canada) titled Moral Judgment, Criminal Law and Constitutional Protection of Religion raises and tackles several issues of interest to the intelligentsia of our multi-diversity polity. It is this set of articles that makes the book worth reading.

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