Conclusion

It is, in the end, a tribute to the wisdom and foresight of the makers of India's Constitution that they were able to hand the nation a document that enshrined fundamental values and the highest aspirations shared by its people. This is one important reason the Constitution has not simply survived, but has become a genuinely living reality, even while so many other constitutions around the world have perished along with the paper they were first written on. India's Constitution has, in turn, become an example other countries have looked to when framing their own — South Africa's constitution being the most notable case. The long process behind it, which stretched across almost three years, was ultimately driven by the search for the right institutional balance: the framers wanted institutions that would be neither haphazard nor merely tentative arrangements, but ones genuinely capable of accommodating the aspirati …