Our New Constitution

On April 28, 1947, India’s Constitution makers re-assembled in Constitution Hall. This brief five-day session saw the adoption of the Fundamental Rights as proposed by Sardar Patel on behalf of the Advisory Committee. An excerpt from an Indian Express article carried in the Independence Number

There were interesting sallies during the debate on various clauses of the Report. Some one suggested that the Fundamental Rights had been framed from the Police Constable’s point of view. Some one retorted that they had been formulated so as to obviate the police constable and save India for democracy!…

Every free State is known by the rights that it maintains and every citizen of a free State has a natural and lawful claim on Society to have the conditions necessary for the good life. Prof. Laski, an acknowledged modern authority on the subject, says, “Rights are the groundwork of the State. They are the quality which gives to the exercise of its power a moral character. And they are natural rights in the sense that they are essential for the good life.”

There was no conception of fundamental rights in ancient Greece where there were the free citizens or ‘haves’ and the slaves or the ‘have-nots’. The legal mind of the Romans conceived the idea of Roman Citizenship. The English Magna Carta and Bill of Rights gave the world the fuller formulation of civic rights… The French Revolution and the American Declaration of Independence were further milestones on the march of man to secure for himself, those conditions without which life has no grand moral content. No great nation since then has framed its Constitution without incorporating these fundamental rights is one form or another. From the point of view of the State’s responsibility with regard to them, these rights can be called justiciable and non-justiciable or those which can be enforced by law and those which cannot. Unlike the fundamental rights incorporated in the Constitution of the USSR and the German Reich which are not enforceable by law, and more like the Fundamental Rights of the Irish Constitution, ours too shall be justiciable. Indeed, the Fundamental Rights adopted during the April-May Session of the Constituent Assembly reveal a vision of free India at once magnificent and modern. It is a great vision as nobly conceived as the Charter of India’s freedom. When these justiciable fundamental rights become the law of the land the people will have the first taste of freedom…

The Rights of Equality guarantee equal rights of every citizen of the Union of free India. A person of any religion, race, caste or sex will have access to trading establishments, including public restaurants, hotels and places of public entertainment, and will be free to use wells, tanks, roads, conveyances, and places of public resort maintained wholly or partly out of public funds or dedicated to the use of the general public. Equality of opportunity will be given to all citizens in matters of public employment and in carrying on any business, trade, occupation or profession. The State will recognise no inequalities merely on the basis of sex, caste, race or religion…