Q.Re-read CAD quotes from Chapter 2 and Chapter 7. Do those arguments have relevance today? Why?

This activity asks you to judge specific CAD quotes from Chapters Two and Seven against the chapter's own test for relevance: has the underlying challenge those debates addressed actually disappeared, or is it still live today? …

This Activity specifically asks you to re-read CAD quotations reproduced in Chapter Two and Chapter Seven of this book and judge, for yourself, whether the arguments made in those particular debates still speak to India today. Because the actual text of those quotes sits in earlier chapters rather than this one, the honest way to answer is to apply the general test this chapter itself supplies, rather than invent quotes that were never given here. That test, laid out under 'Why do we need to go back to the Constituent Assembly?', is this: the world of the original framers and India's present-day world have not changed so drastically, in terms of core values and the basic conception of society and polity, that India has separated itself from the Constituent Assembly's concerns — so 'a history of our Constitution is still very much a history of the present.' The chapter also gives a second, practical reason: many current legal and political practices continue in force even though the reasoning behind them has been forgotten, and that forgotten reasoning only becomes visible again once a practice is challenged — which is exactly when going back to a CAD debate becomes useful, since it recovers the justification a bare provision leaves out. …