Pot calling kettle black

Sir, - This refers to your Editorial, `A cautionary note' (Jan. 29). We hear the chorus that every thing is right with the Indian Constitution; it is sacred, inviolable. But still those who are to be governed and guided by it and who are to implement it can ignore it. This is the Constitution which has allowed government after government to perpetuate social and economic inequalities, corrupt and criminalised politicians to take the seat of power, a government to fall for the lack of one vote and burdened the people with a Rs. 7000-crore election expenditure. It silently watches the judiciary which at times denies even delayed justice; the rich and powerful politicians have made a mockery of it.

Again, the Constitution provides no relief to the people when Parliament is stymied and smittened by irresponsible MPs, and is helpless when a President shares the make-believe world of an Opposition leader who claims to conjure up a magical number of 272 MPs. Is this the democracy validated by an inviolable and immutable Constitution?

The proliferation of political parties, the musical chairs the political leaders play and the heavy burden suffered by the taxpayer for providing security to the politicians who themselves are a risk to democracy have made the President's warning, in his Republic Day-eve address, ``beware the fury of the patient and long suffering people'', true and ominous.

But the Congress(I) and its secular comrades make it look as though his warning was directed only against the present government. That it was against a 50-year history of betrayal of the people and hence the guilt must be laid at the door of the party which ruled the country the longest is lost on the Congress(I). The 24th and 42nd Amendments authored by the Congress did more than `tinkering'; it dented the foundations of the Constitution.

Of the 25-odd Directive Principles not one has been comprehensively implemented even after 50 years. Take, for example, the Directive Principle that the state shall endeavour to secure for its citizens a uniform civil code throughout the territory of India. The governments of the past pretended that it never existed in the Constitution! Now when the NDA Government speaks of it, the `secular forces' are up in arms and brand it anti-minority.

The Congress (I) has no moral right to oppose the review proposal for, as Mr. Mukund Padmanabhan says, ``the sorry truth is that no other party has contributed as much to the ad hoc alteration of the Constitution'' (TheHindu, Jan. 30).

Hilda Raja,

Chennai

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