Lack of responsibility

Sir, - Lately one cannot help but feel that all wings of the Government have lost a sense of their responsibilities, powers and duties.

There is a moving advertisement in the papers in which a young girl exhorts her mother not to buy goods wrapped in polythene as they are injurious to the child's health. The advertisement kills many birds with one stone, being politically correct on at least two counts. It is gender sensitive and it is environmentally conscious. It would do very well coming from an NGO. But it does not. It is issued by the Delhi Government. Why on earth should a Government issue it? Why does it not ban the production of polythene bags? At all times the Government distances itself from the people. On the one occasion when it should assert its powers, it finds it appropriate to pretend to be an NGO!

Worse is to come. As first year students of political science we were taught that the Constitution is supreme, and that if the legislature enacts a law that is violative of the Constitution, the Supreme Court will declare it null and void. Now we have Mr. Ram Jethmalani, the Law Minister, calmly declaring that if the Supreme Court strikes down reservation of more than 50 per cent vacancies in meeting the backlog for the Scheduled Caste and the Scheduled Tribes in government employment, the law will be suitably changed to bypass the Court. It is only the basic structure we cannot touch, he assured anyone who would listen and there were plenty of them. Here is a lawyer who has spent his lifetime asking the Supreme Court for justice for his clients. Yet when the cock crows he has no hesitation in saying that Supreme Court judgments interpreting the Constitution can be routinely flouted by amending the Constitution, unless it involves the basic structure. Pray who is to decide what is basic structure? What is the guarantee that those judgments will not be set aside by our lords and masters, the politicians?

This shabby ill-treatment of courts and the Constitution has of course occurred before (remember the Muslim Women's Bill?) of course, but that is no reason for it to be done again. In fact this time it is worse. It is sad that democracies are really one party systems with every party copying the wrongs done by its predecessors.

If this is an indication of times to come then the Constitutional review is simply unnecessary. The Government can do what it likes with the Constitution. No longer are we talking of Constitutional supremacy but parliamentary hooliganism. To Mr. Jethmalani I would like to say only one thing Et tu Brute?

Vasudha Dhagamwar,

New Delhi

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