Rights & duties
The HinduTHE Constitution of India is a rights-based charter. It was alarming, therefore, to hear the Prime Minister observe recently that in 75 years since India's Independence the focus on rights has weakened India and the next 25 years must focus on duties. With her electoral loss and the victory of the Janata Party, several of the offending sections of the amendment were rolled back; the ones that remained were struck down by the Supreme Court in the celebrated judgment of Minerva Mills Ltd. Nani Palkhivala, the then doyen of the Bar, opened his arguments in the matter by pithily stating that the amendments under challenge effectively turned the Constitution on its head: it enforces what is mere guidance and renders unenforceable the rights that should be enforced. In a 1965 research paper titled “Human Rights in Soviet Union”, Harold J. Berman reflected on rights and duties in the Soviet context as having a “parental conception of law”. At an international judicial conference in 2020, the then Chief Justice of India, S.A. Bobde, spoke about the Constitution’s Fundamental Duties chapter and quoted Mahatma Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj that “real rights are a result of performance of duty”.
History of this topic
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