These days, everyone is talking about the ‘Constitution’ in India! I really doubt whether anyone knows what it actually offers! People become emotional. We have made it into a too sacred a document, like the Gita or the Quran, to be discussed freely.
This lengthy, tiring-to-read document called the ‘Constitution of India’ is copied from various constitutions of the world. It offers us nothing new or concrete. Like any other religious book in the world offering all abstract concepts like heaven etc, the Indian Constitution offers all abstract concepts like Liberty etc to its people, or shall I say, ‘we the people’.
I request you to ask anyone in the world about the meaning of the words ‘Sovereign’, ‘Socialist’, ‘Secular’, and ‘Democratic’ and ‘Republic’ – all these are stated in the constitution. I am sure you will get infinite explanations. None of them will match. If I were to ask the Supreme Leader and President Kim Jong Un of North Korea about democracy, he would say ‘North Korea’ is the only democratic nation in the world! Thus, everyone has their own concept of democracy! None will match.
Further, our Constitution also offers rather liberally to ‘we the people’, more abstract concepts like liberty, equality, justice and fraternity. Plato and Socrates went mad trying to find a definition of justice in the book The Republic. They could not find one. These four words stated in our Constitution have only subjective meanings. God is subjective, and similarly, ‘justice’ or ‘liberty’ is subjective. Everyone can have a different meaning.
I would have appreciated and respected the ‘Constitution’ if it had provided employment and education, housing and healthcare, and food for all. They are concrete things, and we can all see and relate to them. No one can ever be assured of justice and equality without food, health, housing and employment. Any talk of freedom, equality or justice without food, etc., is pure bullshit. It is meaningless talk. It is like a blind man trying to find a black non-existent cat on a dark, moonless night.
If this is the case, I wonder why there is so much emotional talk about the Constitution!
About the Author
Dr. K. Raja Gopal Reddy is a seasoned internationally qualified Insurance professional. What you are reading here, may not answer all the questions we have, but has the absolute power of asking unsettling questions which increase the interest in the strange world, and show the contradictory wonders lying just below the surface of the commonest things of life. Look at this disturbing but beautiful thought of Friedrich Nietzsche “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him”.
Dr. Reddy can be reached at: raja66gopal@gmail.com
