 निलाप जी अगर होतें, तोऔरज तिरसट साल के होतें, सूँसट्णी तरी शाल. अर अगर आज उहमारे भीच सा शरीर होतें, तो उदर के ہیں, किनारे वाली सीटंपर बैटकर मं्द मुसकूर आपे हुए, केंराई होते,चरे वेती, चरे वेती, चलते हो, चलते हो, लड्ते रओ, ब्विरते हो, कभीन दखो, कभीनहार मानो. हम सब निलाप जी को याज करते हृे लगतार तब से चलते जारे हैं. आज छता, निलाप मेमौर्रेल लेक्च्छ शुन्ने आई, आप सभी आदरनी सम्मानित लोगों दोस्तों का ने दिल से आबहार वियक्त करती हूं, स्वागत करती हूं निलार्जी को आजके दोर में यात करना बहुत जरूरी लकता है, क्यों की वे जिस तरह की पत्रकायता करते थे जिन उसुलों पर बहुत कटरता से खडेग हुए ते बहुत मजबुती से जिस विचार्दारा को अगे बड़ाने की अपनी पूरी उम्र में उने कोशिष की जि उस बेसिक कुन्सेप्त पर आज बहुत बर्बर और क्रूर हम्ला है हम सब को इस बात की तीस हमेशा रहेगी कि निलाप जी को बहुत कम समें मिला लेकिन इतने कम समे में वि बहुत लंभी लकीर खीज गए निलाप जी, भिहार, जहां का जन हुए जहां का उआपने को मानते ते, उतने ही वे राजिस्टान के ते राजिस्टान जो लंभे समे तक उंकी कर्म भूमी रही उंकी लाईप पातनर संगरषों की साथी कविता श्रवास्ता उंको वहा मिली फिर दिली तो दिली है अंडिए के विरले संपाडक ठे जिंकी महारत आाँग़ेजी मे वि उत्नी जी ली, आग़ेजी मही उनो अपना ए ashes ke hoon krita एक लेके संस्त्रिष, राजिनी थी के फलोस्पी विच्यान से लेके कला साहीत संस्क्रिती और फिर खाना भोजं भध ठे निलापजी इतने यानी लेकिन मानो एहंकार कही सी चूना गया हो हर वक्ती के लिए मडद करने को तैयार एक आसा संपादक जो शायद इस समें विलुप्त प्रजाती है इस तराके संपादक और खास तोर से हिन्दी में इस तराके संपादक मिलने मुष्किल है अआ वो आहु, आए वो बहlar है, आप अचही बाछ मैंगवारे लेक्चर वी आई सात सब चार मिंग, ऑर न आच्धा, अयंगग एंग, ईंदरा जाजी. ऊंा स्र्श अगाद कोते ही।, ततलविर बल्स लेडी, वो ऩकात है, समझे वेख्र के रच 하나�, इंगार and, sense of inequality and patriarchy तो जे हुवा क्या है, ये अच्छा है, तो फिर बुरा क्या है. She is delivering lecture on from ignoring the constitution to repeating it, failing democracy. समिधान की उपेख्षा से लेकर, समिधान को सीधे सीधे नकार देने तक. विफल लोक तन्ध्र. I have not spent too much time with Neela, but whenever I was in a crisis intellectually, I would pick up the phone and talk to him and say, विफल लोक तन्ध्र. And discuss this issue with me. I do love discussing problems to which I don't find answers with people I trust and he was one of them. So I have a very emotional link with Neela, not so much in terms of time, but in terms of a spiritual and a mental connect. And so I am really delighted to be here, to Neela, this is for you. I think the title of my lecture actually says it all. If I stop there and said nothing more, I think the entire concept that I want to convey is conveyed in this one sentence, ignoring the constitution, from ignoring the constitution to repudiating it. So I think that's like the ultimate stage of this journey, which they began in 2014 and it's going on, but on the 28th of May, I think there was a qualitative change. It was not just a media event, it was a repudiation of the constitution and that's why I have titled this little lecture, repudiating. Now what has bothered me is I need to understand, we need to understand the process through which we reach this milestone. And that is what I am trying to convey to you in this lecture, what is my understanding of the process through which we have reached here. But before that I'd like to say what is it that qualifies me as a lawyer to deliver this lecture. There are many others in this audience who are far, far more qualified to deliver this lecture. There are many others who have worked their way through the politics and the economics of this country. But I was again inspired by a court from Mahatma Gandhi. When he was being tried for sedition, he was told by the British, those who live by the law must keep the law. And this was his retort. If it means that lawyers may never commit a civil breach without incurring the displeasure of the court, it means utter stagnation. Lawyers are persons most able to appreciate the dangers of bad legislation and it must be with them a sacred duty by committing a civil breach to prevent a criminal breach. Lawyers should be guardians of law and liberty and as such are interested in keeping the statute book of the country, quote, pure and undefiled. Now it saddens me, I had shared this court with a friend of mine and asked her what she thought about it. She shared it with her son who is a lawyer. He came back to her and told her, this is not true, he said. And the example he gave is that when Kaniya Kumar was produced in the court, it was a bunch of lawyers who did exactly the opposite of this. They attacked him inside the premises of the courtroom. So her son turned around and said to me, how can you say this? But I decided to stick to my trajectory which is that it is the sacred duty of lawyers to keep the constitution of India, quote, pure and undefiled. So in conditions that obtain in the country today, there are apprehensions which are very well founded that the constitution may become a mere artifact to be kept in a museum. So apart from keeping it pure and undefiled, we also have to critique the entire process through which we got here. So how did we get to this stage? So the preamble to the constitution was meant to secure, the word secure is very important. It is in the preamble to secure to its citizens justice, liberty, equality, fraternity and dignity. And what I find is that the methodology by which the ruling party has brought us to this path is by replacing these words. Now how have they replaced these words? The justice has been replaced with injustice, liberty has been replaced with repression, equality has been replaced with discrimination and fraternity has been replaced with hatred and dignity with demonization. So this is the method, it's the core values of the constitution which have been simply replaced without amending the constitution. This is the big mystery about what's going on in this country today. How did they manage to do it without amending the constitution? Now it's a journey which has been a long journey, 75 years, I don't know what they call it, I think they call it Amritka or whatever. But it has been a journey and there is a particular quote from a judgement by justice Chandrachud in the Shabri Malay case where this is how he describes the journey. This is a quote, reading Dr. Amritka compels us to think about the other side of independence. Besides the struggle for independence from British rule, there was another struggle going on since centuries which still continues till today. That struggle has been the struggle for social emancipation, it has been the struggle for the replacement of an unequal social order. It has been a fight for undoing historical injustice and for writing fundamental wrongs with fundamental rights. The constitution of India is the end product of these two struggles. So I consider this to be a very beautiful passage in which he has described the journey through which the constitution was not only enacted but through which it has to be kept pure and undefiled. So my own work has been and the work of civil society has been on this what he calls the other side of independence. All democratic and non-violent struggles have been located on the other side of independence in these 75 years. It is also what has inspired my work as a lawyer. To use a clichéd phrase as one of Midnight's children, I am ancient, my earliest memories go back to India's first independence day. As a child my father had taken me to watch what he called the lights of independence. Until this day when I passed the municipal corporation of Bombay and what was once called Victoria Terminal, you will see those two buildings lit up in exactly the same way as they were on the very first day of independence. But of course a lot has changed since then. As a migrant to this country, as a refugee from Pakistan, I saw only one picture adorning the walls of my new found home and that was the picture of Mahatma Gandhi and Nehru cleaning in and talking to each other and I kept wondering what is it that they are talking about. So what was it that attracted people like me and my family to this country? It was not our ancestral home. This was not our village. It was our hopes and aspirations of a less beleaguered future that brought us to this nation. It was a feeling of finally having found stability within which day-to-day life could go on. It was the fraternity and pluralism of the constitution which was a safe haven for all of us. That space of stability, that safe harbour was a space within which we could find the values of equality, non-discrimination, freedom, liberty and dignity. It was the constitution which was our link to citizenship and nationhood. My own work was guided by the directive principles of state policy fundamental to the governance of the country in which I found my own bearings as a lawyer. Being the outcome of a political struggle, the constitution embodied political principles but and this is what I want to emphasise, it also created a legal order which was made expressly enforceable by the judiciary. So mind you, the constitution is not just a political document. It is also the supreme legal document which enables us to enforce the rights which are granted in the constitution. These rights of course were given by the constitution but the struggle has been to implement these rights. Now I'll just say a few words about the division of rights in the constitution. They are divided into what we call social and economic rights which are progressively realisable and civil and political rights which are immediately enforceable. Now the immediately enforceable rights are the right to freedom of speech and expression. They don't need a progressive realisation whereas the economic and social rights such as the right to work, the right to housing, they are progressively realisable because they were linked to the stage of economic development in the country. And I believe this distinction came about internationally. People have rejected this distinction but the distinction does exist in the Indian constitution as well. Now I think that people of my generation we took our civil and political rights for granted. We thought they would never end. We thought they would never be taken away from us. We thought this was a constitution without end. And we saw our challenges as working towards implementing social and economic rights which is the reason why most of my early work focused on the right to housing, the Olga Teles case, the Bombay Hawkers Union case. Several cases we raised the issue of the right to work, the right to housing, the right to minimum wages etc. And progressively these rights were implemented by the courts. Today of course I stand at a different juncture because like many of you in this audience I too have my political and civil rights have also been taken away and targeted. Targeted with an FIR which we'll talk about a little later. So today we find ourselves not only in a situation which our civil and political rights are taken away but also our social and economic rights. We not only see a de facto erasure of secularism from the living practices of the state but also a failing democracy which is brought about by the collapse of the separation of powers between the legislature, executive and judiciary but the breaking down of constitutional barriers between them, independence of other institutions such as the CBI, ED, CBC, described by Justice Kabadia as institutions of integrity. They have been robbed of their independence and of their integrity. This is of course evident from the fact that 12 political parties filed a petition in the Supreme Court unsuccessfully saying that the ED is targeting them. More recently Justice Joseph called them guarantor of fourth branch institutions such as the election commission which needs to be insulated from powers of majorities and to deliver their mandate independent of ruling parties. Now political parties do not honour rulings of the Supreme Court. And one of the cases which I had discussed with Neelab also was what is known as the Abhiram case. The Abhiram case interpreted section 123 of the representation of people's act and the issue there was can anybody campaign for an election based on religion and the Supreme Court said no can be seen for votes on the base of religion by you or your agent or anybody to whom you have given a consent is illegal. And yet of course we also this practical of a high ranking minister of this country saying one day before the election that when you press the button please say Jay Bajrangbali and cast your vote. And all this is going on without any form of accountability. I already told you that the constitution is a document which is meant to hold people to account. So what has happened is that the constitution has been denuded of its enforceability and it has been reduced to a document of pure and simple political intent to be enforced by an executive at its discretion. There is no legal accountability anymore. All this has been achieved without amending the constitution and this is the question that has been bothering me how can you do all this without amending the constitution. So we try to look for reasons and looking at these reasons I tried to look back 75 years. So the question that we do need to ask ourselves how is it come about. Now law is nothing but the written word. We are governed by the written word. And this written word obviously can only be altered by amendment through written words. What we are seeing today is that the text of the constitution remains in place while its core values of justice, equality, liberty, fraternity have been repudiated. Now of course Keshavananda Bharti was decided in 1973 and it held that the basic features of the constitution such as fundamental rights, secularism, democracy, federalism could not be amended even by a constitutional amendment. While the constitution of India has been often amended its basic features have been maintained in judicial discourse. The judges will tell you all the time democracy is a basic feature. They will say federalism is a basic feature. They will say that these cannot be amended by a constitution. So what do you do? What does the government do? They find a way of amending without amending. Yet today you see the same result as we would have seen if there was an actual amendment of the constitution. How have they done this? In my opinion it has been done by creating a norm higher than the constitutional norm. Now we have all been brought up to believe that the constitution is a grown norm. But what we are seeing today is that this course of the ruling party is to say there is a norm which is above the grown norm and that norm will come to that in a minute. Obviously that norm is Hindutva which is over and above the norm that the constitution puts in place. And so the entire constitution has to be interpreted with reference to that norm. They have found a way, they have found a device by which they have gone around the constitution and gone around the need to amend the constitution. But of course after 2024 one doesn't know if they come back to power, we will see the amendment. But as of today, as I speak today there is no amendment and that is why I am entitled to stick to the letter of the constitution and say this is my constitution. So you have the creation of a norm which is placed above the norm of the constitution. A new set of practices have replaced constitutionalism and legality and have been elevated to a level above the constitution with reference to which the constitution and its basic features have to be interpreted. See every written document requires interpretation, every document. It has to meet the challenges of time. It has to cater to the needs of the younger generation, the future generation and that is the process of interpretation. So every constitution has to be interpreted by judges. So how is this interpretation being done? It is being done with interpretation to a norm which is outside the constitution. Rights as we know them have been replaced by duties negating the entire chapter on fundamental rights. I had occasion to deal with one of the beef bank cases in the Supreme Court of India which arose from an appeal from the High Court and I was shocked when I read the judgement authored by Justice Lahoti when he was Chief Justice. See you must understand the process through which this happens. So there were those cases which said that you can slaughter animals. Even cows can be slaughtered after the age of 16 years when they cease to be productive. All that changed with Justice Lahoti's judgement. But you know one thing you must grant to the ruling party. They have a lot of patience. He waited. He waited and waited and waited till he became the Chief Justice and then he packed the court. He constituted a court of seven judges and he wrote a judgement overruling all the previous judgements. And in that judgement when I was reading it I was trying to look at the methodology. How has it been done? And I found that he referred to fundamental duties and he said these are the duties that I am implementing now and that's when I realised what's happening in the courts is a reversal between the two chapters of fundamental rights and fundamental duties and fundamental duties are now being used to deliver judgements forgetting that there is a chapter on fundamental rights. That's when it hit me to begin with. So there is a new language which we hear all the time which is our intrinsic dharma of the people of India which is ancient and which predates the constitution. This is the point. If this predates the constitution then you can use it to interpret the constitution. That's the argument that we are given. Once a norm above the constitution is created it's easy to see why there is no need for an amendment because there is a norm which is more basic than the basic features. Say for two significant amendments which we all know about one was the application of article 370 of the constitution of India which was very interesting. It was done during a period of presence rule and it was done simply by changing the language from the consent of the state government to the consent of the president and during that period it was president's rule and so virtually the central government gave consent to itself. That's how they achieved an abrogation of article 370 of the constitution of India so you see words can mean what you want them to mean and you just redefine what state assembly means and you achieved a constitutional end and of course the other one was the amendment to the introducing reservations for economically weaker sections which specifically says that it excludes schedule cast, schedule tribes and OBCs meaning thereby an amendment which gave reservation to the upper caste but that at least had the benefit had the credibility of being introduced through an amendment to the constitution. No doubt the amendment was never debated in parliament the amendment was passed within a matter of five minutes and every political party agreed to that amendment. I won't take you through the long journey where it was argued in court and the court upheld it. Now we come to in the journey I come to the emergency of 1975 I see people here in the audience who were also around when the emergency was declared and who were actually arrested I wasn't arrested but my office was certainly raided because we were providing legal services to George Fernandez and the railway workers who were dismissed. So that's when we got the real root shock where we realized that our civil and political rights which we thought would never be taken away for us were actually taken away. The legitimacy of protest which was a legacy of the independence movement the legacy of non-violent struggle and civil disobedience was brought to a brutal and abrupt end when the emergency was declared in 1975. The emergency was declared there's a point I wish to make here which is rather important the emergency was declared based on article 352 of the constitution of India. So there was an internal exceptionalism in the constitution which was used to declare the emergency there was no repudiation of the constitution there was no ignoring of the constitution it was a constitutional device that was used to declare an emergency however wrongly however much the result the outcome would have been a complete suspension of our civil and political rights but the legitimacy of the constitution was not denied it was declared by an elected executive now of course we know there was no cause for it and look at the way I have been looking at what happened to people who were opposing the emergency and I found that the law of sedition was not used against them they were preventively detained whether it was Jehprakash Narayan or whether it was anybody else there was a preventive detention law under which they were detained but section 124A of the Indian Penal Code was not used against them today you see it being used you know as I will say for every petty occasion we use it of course the habeas for corpus petitions were rejected we all know that ADM Jabalpur I don't have to labour the point of course the emergency did meet with massive protests which ultimately led to the withdrawal of the emergency and the declaration of elections at which the party which declared the emergency was thrown out of power when the new government came to power the constitution was again amended to remove the ability to declare an emergency on internal disturbance again through a constitution so you see throughout this period it is the constitution which is the centre of our discourse it meant that throughout the emergency the Indian political discourse centre around the constitution of India it was the universe around which all of us argued our cases the emergency demonstrated the strength and the malability of constitutionalism it demonstrated that political process and parties and individuals approach a written document namely they could shape and approach their attitudes this was it but during the emergency both those who supported it and those who opposed it appealed to liberal democracy both Mrs Gandhi and Jay Prakash Narayan called each other fascists and both of them said what we are doing is we are restoring liberal democracy so that I have taken from a quote from Bipin Chandra who in his book in the name of democracy says the defence of Indian democracy seems to have been the main justification for both the JP movement so the point I am making is you still have some respect for the constitution even if you declare an emergency when we come to the present phase it is not what we are seeing today at all the ruling party as I said does not appeal to the constitution it appeals to a norm above the constitution by which we are supposed to judge the legality of state actions in other words there is something more basic than the constitution itself more basic than the basic structure of the constitution by which accountability is to be judged and if they comply with that then they are clean home and dry we are not entitled to criticise that so it is a clever device by which the constitution itself has been ignored it has been bypassed and they don't have to feel any sense of guilt for it and as I said all they have done is replace the values and they have replaced the values of justice, liberty, equality fraternity and dignity with hatred, discrimination as I said earlier but it was those values which gave us a sense of identity, self-worth and empowerment so what we are seeing today is a suspension of these core values in effect a suspension of the constitution itself you know at least Pakistan had the courage to in writing suspend its constitution what we are seeing in India today is a suspension of the constitution but without a written document to call it an undeclared emergency does not capture the process through which this has come about there are major differences between the two while the emergency did not deny the legitimacy of liberal democracy as such today there is no pretence by the ruling party to defend liberal democracy efforts are made to transform the state not one governed by the constitution but by the ideology of cultural nationalism so that is the norm that I was talking about the norm above the norm there is now a Hindutva jurisprudence which has entered the courtroom which holds that culture is a norm above the constitution with reference to which the constitution must be interpreted not by its written word the constitution including its preamble now it is my belief that the constitution including preamble is a sui generis document it cannot be interpreted with reference to anything that went before it there is no question because it represents a revolutionary break with the past with the march of time all written texts of course do require interpretation and so does the constitution because it is a sui generis document it can only be interpreted with reference to itself internally as I said it represented a complete break from everything that went before it and hence the ideology of past political religious ideologies cannot be used to interpret the constitution sadly what we are seeing today is an appeal to the Vedic past and their text to interpret the constitution forgetting that it was an unequal obscurantist past which was being discarded in favour of democracy and empowering rights and freedoms the cultural past to which the appeal is made is of course one culture we all know that I don't need to repeat all this it governs our duties to the nation and our adherence to this culture will determine whether we are patriotic or anti-national human rights as we have known that we are told is a western import the caste system we are told never existed scientific temperament was completely abandoned in favour of superstition and obscurantism this I think in one of the lectures with Mr. Grover delivered at the Neelab Memorial Lecture very elaborately he had explained how when it came to co-vaped the decision taken out of the hands of scientists and vested in guess who one person the home minister and how was this achieved it was achieved by invoking the disaster management act which is directly executed by the home minister that was the legal device unlike many other countries which enacted legislation to deal with the pandemic India did not enact any legislation to deal with the pandemic now it pains me to talk about the judiciary but I guess I have to when the NJAC decision was rendered we were told that the judiciary will retain its primacy in the matter of appointment of judges and it was the late Arun Jaitley who made that immortal statement that the will of the majority has been defeated by an unelected judiciary and yet they continue to be in power and they did not introduce a new law they did not introduce a new amendment to the constitution bringing in a more democratic college system all we saw is dog whistles from the law minister the vice president of India in an attempt to chip away at the credibility of the judiciary but let's look a little more closely at the judiciary we are told that the college system was intended to keep the primacy of the judiciary in the matter of appointment of judges now this is where you can pollute the fountain at its source in the matter of appointment of judges and that power is kept within the hands of the judiciary till today they do have the primacy and they do make appointments to the college while this was what we were told the recent history of the supreme court tells a different story of very comfortable coexistence with the executive through a system of give and take now the prime example of this is of course college recommendations not being implemented in particular justice Akhil Gureshi who was involved in the Surabhaddin case when he was in Gujarat he would never ever make it to any high court of state which was ruled by the BJP sometimes they post you in Congress rule state and say go there and make your trouble the most recent example of course was the case of the appointment of Victoria Gowri whose videos are available till today on YouTube where she talks about Christians as being involved in white terror which is worse than green terror and yet this woman was recommended for appointment to the supreme court of India by the collegium headed by the current Chief Justice of India a more dramatic example of hate speak cannot be found and it confounds me how the supreme court can deliver judgements on hate speech on the judicial side and on the administrative side sanction the appointment of people when challenged of course the petition was rejected so when it comes to the judiciary the issue is why bother to amend the constitution if you can do it through the back door what you can't do to the front door take the talk of diversity in the judiciary very recently there was a lot of talk about diversity and yet I don't know whether you know that 40% of all judges sitting judges today in the supreme court are brahmins I can't see the diversity that is being talked about and these distortions in proportionate representation is what encourages majoritarian approaches to lawmaking and to decision making judges are also very talkative of the bench and many of them are loved to accept invitations from the Aadivakta Parishad to come and deliver lectures almost every one of them and at these lectures you really get an insight into their mind and they have been saying things like oh you know article 72 of the constitution and section 332 of the constitution existed in India and is mentioned in Valmiki's Ramayana and then you have another judge mind you a supreme court judge who said quote it is accepted that India had a justice system even during the bronze age and Kautilya's Arthashastha he said knew about legal realism long before foreign scholars even coined that word this attempt to link the jurisprudence of the constitution India to Kautilya on the ethos of the constitution and it runs across the executive legislature and judiciary the attempt here is not to deep brahmanise but to reinforce the references to Arthashastha selectively and politically as Brijner and Mani writes in deep brahmanising history and I quote in the Arthashastha the much acclaimed treatise and this is supreme court judge mind you saying this is what India's legal system is all about in the Arthashastha the much acclaimed treatise on state craft Kautilya is concerned with the preservation of Varna Dharma through Danda in the same way Danda and Danda alone protects this world and the next his Danda is employed to uphold the Vedas Kautilya the alleged architect of Hindu secular state craft requires every Varna to perform its functions the world will be destroyed he tells us if we do not honour a Varna Dharma he instructs the king that he should never allow the people to deviate from the path of caste duty and we have judges of the supreme court quoting him as their inspiration these values of the constitutions were gifts of the freedom movement and the anti-colonial struggle which was cemented into the constitution by Dr Ambedkar there was a conscious attempt to deep brahmanise society and to deny the caste system through article 17 of the constitution of India so I don't understand how judges can talk like this but they do now quickly when it comes to each branch when it comes to executive I suppose the janta party did have a policy that you cannot be a member of two organisations you cannot be a member of the RSS and be in the government this regime has no such policy and that is why you will see in fact the ban on the RSS I am told was removed because it claimed to be quote-unquote a cultural organisation and not a political one and yet today you will see in the government the statistics are well known how many ministers have their origins in the RSS so that's on account of the fact that there is no ban on being a member of two organisations so you can see the agenda being implemented on a day-to-day basis there are many examples of it whether it comes to the curriculum comes to the Akhan Bharat map which is installed in parliament leading to protests from neighbouring countries or it is the change changing the names of cities I was once approached to do this case about name change of Aurangabad and the people who were bringing the case to court told me we don't really mind name change what we do mind is that they have named it Shambhaji Nagar is that it will lead to a feeling of revenge and even if you want to change the name of a city why are you encouraging revenge and now you can see all the rights that are happening in Kolapur decision making must be based on data as I said in COVID it was not based on data scientists were ignored the attempt was to centralise power in the hands of one single person under the disaster management act politically neutral bureaucracy has also been turned into a political institution and in my opinion the function of the bureaucracy the IS has been outsourced to the Neethi IO talking to a few senior IS officers they told me we have been reduced to the doing the function of registrars to our ministry where all we have to do is put a stamp on the decisions taken at the Neethi IO Parliament obviously has been undermined by and being refused to function but one particular amendment which affects all of us and certainly affects me deeply because me and my partner have both received notices under the prevention of money laundering act from the ET summoning us to come and attend their office the issue here is that these amendments were passed as money bills under article 110 of the constitution of India by passing any debate I am not aware of how a crime can be created under a money bill the crime was actually created under a money bill now these challenges are pending in court but how long I don't know whether they will be decided in my lifetime to be decided sometime so the media we all know the way in which it has been defanged digital media and you know we Basha mentioned that me and my partner we were founders of the leaflet which is a digital legal portal and when these rules were introduced we thought that it was our duty to challenge the rules relating to digital media and we did challenge it in the Bombay High Court and I would say successfully where the high court state the operation of a rule which enable the government to direct us to pull down any data and this is what the court said people would be starved of liberty of thought and feel suffocated to exercise their right of freedom of speech and expression if they are made to live in the present times on content regulation on the internet with the code of ethics which is hanging over their head as a sword of democulus this regime must run clearly contrary to the well recognized constitution ethos and principles but despite judgments of this kind the subsequent amendments have come as you know they are putting in place a fact checking unit which will be that belonging to the government of India coming to civil society as I said many of us in this audience have faced the ED and why is it surprising it's not because it was Ajit Dhol who said publicly that now the war will be fought through civil society we know all this about how FCR licenses have been cancelled how notices have been sent of course it's very painful to open the morning newspapers and to read that T-star settle word is being told that she had manipulated cooked up a controversy cooked up a conspiracy mind you it is a judiciary which is single handedly responsible for victimizing how let's not have any illusions about that and then we see that rapists have been acquitted and we've also seen how in the best bakery case there's been an acquittal on the ground that the individual role has not been proved in court so what was that entire battle from 2002 to today all about I really don't know so again how does this happen see in a court of law you're told that misuse of the law is no reason to end the law it's no reason to abolish the law it's no reason to declare it unconstitutional but in my opinion abuse of law is no longer abuse of law it's policy it has been elevated to the level of a policy the ruling party uses the law knowing that it is illegal and I have to say that this came as a surprise to me some time ago when I was dealing with the case of a police officer in Gujarat who was told that he must take action against Malikasarabhai and he said look he told the then chief minister I've done an investigation and I've found that there is no evidence against us so I have to close the case and he was told by the chief minister I don't care whether there is evidence against or no evidence against her you have to file the FIR and let's fight it out in court so if this is the policy in which criminal law is being used then it's squarely unconstitutional prosecutorial discussions are outsourced to the party obviously a new language has been invented we all know this this is how the language is being used against us and I would just on the other hand we know that there is impunity for the right wingers who can say what they want to say and get away with it it is as if they have been given amnesty in advance it is as if they have been given a pardon in advance of going through the entire drill of prosecution it's no different from that so these are the twin ways in which impunity operates impunity for them and a policy decision as far as civil society is concerned so it is that this is the reason why I use this title this is the reason why I started this lecture by saying that the constitution has been ignored and it has been now repudiated so I would like to definitely now say a few words and end there about the final stages of this 75 year journey which I believe occurred on the 28th of May 2023 when the new parliament was inaugurated and as a lawyer if I look at it it is a repudiation of the constitution altogether it is not my case that a new parliament should not have been built you can't build a new parliament building if you feel that the old building is not large enough to accommodate what you are anticipating after the delimitation of 2026 the other governments also attempted to build a new parliament they didn't get around to building it so that's not the issue the issue is the parliament it's also not the issue why wasn't the president invited of course he should have been invited but that's another issue but the real issue of course is who does parliament belong to parliament is a creature of the constitution and it's the house of people it's called the house of people so the question is how is it that in the house of people you can install a symbol which is symbol of kingship which is a repudiation of everything that republicanism ever stood for it is a rejection of the liberal core of the constitution which found its reflection as I said in the preamble it is the spirit it's the republican spirit in its purest form which saw sovereignty west in the people which is the heart of the constitution which is the legitimate source of power for the ruling party the installation of the sungal by the speaker's chair I don't know if anyone has an answer to the question why it was installed at the speaker's chair someone was having a discussion with me and said well in any case it's a symbol of the executive so why shouldn't it be in the prime minister's chamber why is it by the speaker's chair there's no answer to that why it is there and of course what we are told is that it's there to remind us of our dharma but I don't know if you've entered any of you but I'm told that above the canopy of the speaker's chair there is already a a Buddhist sutra which talks about dharma chakra and that this dharma chakra must go on so why we needed one more symbol is anybody's guess now so therefore why do I say it can never symbolize the transfer of power parliament has been established by the constitution of India the constitution which enacted the constitution of the 25th and November 49 did not derive its authority to frame the constitution from any sanghwala any dharma nakal idikth the constitution assembly received its sovereign power from the British parliament under the Indian independence act of 1947 that's what my legal training tells me in respect of British India territory with regard to the princely states like my sovereign order the constitution assembly got its power by transforming instruments of accession signed by the princes after the lapse of British paramountcy neither the British parliament nor the 500 princes acquired their sovereignty of power by divine origin so therefore it will remain a mystery not just a mystery but also a turning point I don't think it was just another event which we can say oh he's given to event management the constitution assembly enacted the constitution bringing in the words me the people after the constitution came into post transfer of power now that was the origin but after the constitution comes into form transfer of power takes place at an election regime change happens at an election through the through elected sovereign power western the people delegated to their representatives in parliament the stated justification as I told you was that we need to be reminded of adharma so in my opinion 28 may 23 mark the beginning of yet another transformation of the Indian state from ignoring the constitution we have reached a stage where we have repudiated its very origins the instigation of the song girl next to the speakers chair represents this repudiation of republicanism it's a truism which no one can deny that sovereign power western the people so as I said we have no problem with building a new parliament but we have I have a problem with the installation and then of course the presence of priests at the ceremony cannot but be seen as contrary to secularism we have article 28 and 29 in the constitution which say that state funds cannot be used for education if they can't be used for education how can they be used for anything else the state has no religion to follow or promote or to propagate what what is heart breaking is to see judges attending the inauguration why they did it I don't know so this is the contrast that I have been trying to make and I'm going to conclude here while during the emergency of 1975 fundamental rights were suspended what we are visiting witnessing today is a suspension of the very constitution itself now at least in Pakistan it had there was a merit of a written document which suspended the constitution we don't have any such document here which we can challenge or hold our ruling party accountable in a court of law through these combinations of strategies which include divide and rule they have succeeded in doing what I say they are doing that is repudiating so there is a big difference between sometimes I hear this is an undeclared emergency and that's why I wanted to take this trouble to say no this is something very different we know that we know that Mrs Gandhi used constitutional means to support democracy she did not ignore the constitution what we are seeing today is and she used the exceptionalism in the constitution itself the present government is simply ignoring the constitution and now repudiating it when abuse of power becomes a policy it begins to look like the new normal and few of us bother to challenge it I'd like to just end by saying that constitutional remedies are often exposed factor so I would like to wait and see where this installation is going to go and I will conclude by saying that in one of my earlier lectures I had said that the illusion of democracy is really more dangerous than the absence of it today I would say that the illusion of a constitution is more dangerous than the absence of it thank you