New Delhi: Chief Justice of India Surya Kant on Friday said the Constitution is a “continuing responsibility” and the great work of giving life to its ideals passes from one generation to the next.
The CJI was addressing the first national conference organised by the SC, ST & OBC Advocates Association on “The Life, Struggle, and Constitutional Legacy of Bharat Ratna Dr B R Ambedkar” at Bharat Mandapam here.
He said that Ambedkar, a great son of India, was a scholar of formidable learning and a reformer of unwavering courage, and he fought many of his most consequential battles through the law.
The CJI said he believes that the most enduring fruit of those battles is the Constitution.
“I have always felt that the Constitution is a continuing responsibility, for while its text is complete, the great work of giving life to its ideals passes from one generation to the next,” he said.
He said long before Ambedkar became independent India’s first law minister and chaired the drafting committee, he was a member of the Bar who knew the weight of a brief as well as the long wait for justice.
“Education, he understood, was the first instrument of freedom, for it opens the way to work, to a voice in public life, and to the confidence to claim one’s rights,” the CJI said.
He said with remarkable foresight, Ambedkar championed the provision that made the right to approach the Supreme Court to enforce fundamental rights itself a fundamental right, and he described it to the Constituent Assembly as “the very soul of the Constitution and the very heart of it”.
“For a person who has been wronged and has nowhere else to turn, a right that she cannot reach, understand, or afford to claim remains a right only on paper, and carrying it from the paper to the person is the part of his work that now falls to the Bench and the Bar,” the CJI said.
He said Ambedkar knew that the courts alone could never make equality a lived reality, for his idea of democracy reached far beyond the courtroom.
“For him, democracy lived in the everyday dealings of citizens, in whether they shared their interests freely and met one another as equals, which is why he called fraternity ‘only another name for democracy’,” the CJI said.
He said Ambedkar carried this conviction into the Constituent Assembly, warning in his closing address that political democracy cannot last unless social democracy — “a way of life which recognises liberty, equality and fraternity as the principles of life” — lies at its base.
The CJI said Ambedkar had cautioned, too, that India was entering “a life of contradictions”, equal in its politics but unequal in its social and economic life.
“I have come to see that contradiction as a gap between the clock of law, which began to strike on January 26, 1950, and the clock of society, which moves only as fast as conscience moves,” he said.
The CJI said Ambedkar’s faith in law was tested most severely at Mahad, a town in Konkan.
“In 1923, the Bombay Legislative Council had resolved that public watering places should be open to the depressed classes, and the Mahad municipality accordingly opened its ‘chavdar’ tank to all, yet in the face of fierce opposition, the depressed classes still could not draw water from it three years later,” he said.
The CJI said to give that right some real meaning, Ambedkar went to the tank with his supporters and they drank its water.
The CJI said within months, the municipality withdrew its resolution under pressure and when a civil suit followed, the court restrained him and his followers from going to the tank.
He said in 1937, the Bombay High Court finally dismissed the appeal against him.
He said from that struggle, Ambedkar drew three lessons — that a right granted by resolution can be withdrawn as easily as it was given; that a right is only as strong as the remedy behind it; and that even a just cause can take far too long to succeed in court.
“The first two he would later write into the Constitution itself, while the third remains a responsibility that rests with all of us,” the CJI said.
“A right, however firmly declared, means little without a remedy, and this second lesson of Mahad found its answer in Article 32, for he had learnt that a citizen’s rights must never depend on the goodwill of the very authority he may need to challenge,” he said.
