This volume presents a collection of some important rulings of the Supreme Court of India on the concepts, thoughts and institutions linked to ancient India and Indian civilisation. These rulings bring out the endeavours of constitutionalism in India to acknowledge, understand and recognise the legitimate, yet hidden and unexpressed, urges of 'traditional' India. And that is precisely the reason why these rulings of the highest judiciary have been compiled, critiqued and presented as a compendium for demonstrating the strenuous endeavours of Constitutional India to find its roots in traditional India.
The 'modern' 'secular' Constitution, on which the Constitutional India functions, is based on the Anglo- Saxon experiences. This Anglo-Saxon constitutional instrumentality that free India had adopted to institute a modern nation-state to govern this ancient nation contained seeds of ideological tensions and conflicts between 'traditional India and the 'modern' India-here 'modern' means what is essentially Western. The India that is repeatedly and alternately referred to here as 'modern' and 'secular' commonly shares embarrassment and allergy for Indian traditions and traditional Indians.
Free India's leadership was a mix of those indigenously nurtured and those overawed by the West with the latter holding the reigns of power within and outside the State apparatus. In the euphoria generated by freedom, the leadership could not fully realise the dangerous potentialities the Anglo Saxon modernism drafted into the Constitution exposed the nation to, unless handled sensitively. The seeds of discord between the 'secular' 'modern' constitution and the traditional India soon germinated and gradually sprouted as subterranean tensions between the 'modern' India and the traditional. These tensions turned into conflicts that intensified post freedom, and resulted in the virtual de-legitimisation of the traditional India in polity and public life.
The contradictions between an Anglo Saxon modelled 'secular' Constitution and an India largely driven by traditions could have been de. risked to the minimum though not fully eliminated by wise and sensitive leadership and empathetic intellectualism with sympathy for Indian traditions. The contradiction between the modern India and the traditional one was never unmanageable then, nor is it now.
The Indian tradition was never a frozen institution like its cousins in different parts of the world. It was and is even now an open-minded, debate-friendly thought which contained in itself seeds of change dictated by the march of time. The Indian civilisation had always demonstrated unbelievable capacity for change in tune with times even while maintaining its traditions and being proud of its continuity. Thus it has always been a 'changing India' and equally a 'changeless India'. But it required mature political leadership, empathetic intellectualism and fair polity to handle the contradiction between the 'modern' Constitution and traditional India and to effect changes without offending continuity.
On the contrary, the real polity practised in free India fertilised and fomented, instead of minimising, the discord, by vote-bank politics that virtually invented, instead of assimilating, and promoted, rather than subsuming, the majority and minority divide for political gain. It also discriminated against traditional India largely represented by Hindu civilisational moorings and even trivialised it. 'Secular intellectualism controlled by the Left and the agnostic and atheistic lot only abetted this divisive polity and added fuel to the fire. Whenever traditional India found an isolated spokesman to speak on its behalf and voice its grievances against the wholesale delegitimization of ancient India, the 'secular' India converged against and set upon such rare voice in defence of the traditional India and charged it with dividing the nation! With the result the greatest unifying idea of India came to be ridiculed as divisive.
Hindu (935)
Agriculture (118)
Ancient (1085)
Archaeology (754)
Architecture (563)
Art & Culture (910)
Biography (702)
Buddhist (544)
Cookery (167)
Emperor & Queen (565)
Islam (242)
Jainism (307)
Literary (896)
Mahatma Gandhi (372)
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