Q.Are liberty, equality, fraternity practised in your classroom? How can they coexist? Discuss.

No constitution is purely the product of the specific assembly that happens to draft it, and this is especially true of India's Constitution. An assembly as diverse as the Constituent Assembly could never have worked as effectively as it did without a shared, background consensus among its members on the Constitution's main principles — and that consensus was not invented from scratch inside the Assembly itself, but had been built up over decades during the long struggle for independence, through debates about the shape India's government should take, the values it should uphold, and the inequalities it should overcome. In this sense, the Constituent Assembly was really giving concrete institutional shape and legal form to answers the nationalist movement had already worked out. The single best summary of these inherited principles is the Objectives Resolution, moved by Jawaharlal Nehru in 1946, which defined the aims the Assembly would work toward and gave institutional expression to a set of fundamental commitments — equality, liberty, democracy, sovereignty and a cosmopolitan identity for the new nation — including that India would be an independent, sovereign republic and a Union of erstwhile British Indian territories, Princely States and other willing parts; that its constituent units would be autonomous, retaining all powers not specifically assigned to the Union; that all power and authority of the Constitution and of a sovereign India would flow from the people themselves; that social, economic and political justice, equality of status and opportunity, and fundamental freedoms of speech, expression …