Ch 9Constitution as a Living Document — Class 11 Political Science, concept-first.

This chapter looks at how India has been governed by one and the same Constitution for more than 69 years, even though it has been amended many times.

India's Constitution was adopted on 26 November 1949 and its implementation formally began on 26 January 1950.

It is not unusual for nations to rewrite their constitutions when circumstances, ideas in society, or politics change sharply.

Article 368 of the Constitution gives Parliament the power to amend, by way of addition, variation or repeal, any provision of the Constitution, following the procedure the article itself lays down.

The makers of the Constitution wanted it to be both 'flexible' (open to change) and 'rigid' (resistant to casual change) at the same time, so that it could be corrected where it had genuine faults, wi…

For some provisions of the Constitution, even special majority in Parliament is not considered a strong enough form of consent.

By 26 January 2024, when the Constitution completed 74 years, it had already been amended 106 times. Given how demanding the amendment procedure is, that number can look surprisingly high.

Looking at the content of India's amendments so far, they broadly fall into a few groups. One large group consists of amendments that are technical or administrative in nature — they only clarify, exp…

A number of amendments exist because Parliament and the judiciary, at different times, read the same constitutional text differently.

A third, large group of amendments came about not from conflict but from a broad political consensus among parties that certain changes were needed.

Not every amendment has gone through smoothly. The period from 1970 to 1980 in particular generated real legal and political controversy, and parties that were in the opposition during 1971-1976 saw m…

One development that has had a genuinely long-lasting effect on how the Constitution has evolved is the theory of the 'basic structure' of the Constitution, put forward by the judiciary in the landmar…

We have described our Constitution as a living document. Almost like a living being, it keeps responding to situations and circumstances as they arise, and it responds to experience — this ability to…

The long controversy between the judiciary and Parliament ultimately turned on a genuine and important disagreement.

The same controversy that produced the basic structure doctrine also revealed something about India's political leadership.

There can still be debates about exactly what constitutes the basic structure, and there is nothing wrong with such debates — in a democracy, politics is necessarily full of debate and disagreement, a…