KOCHI:
India as a society ought to uphold the Constitutional morality against all attempts to impose majoritarian morality on its people, according to well-known thinker-writer Sunny M. Kapicadu.
“The only read-worthy book that has been published in India in the modern times is our Constitution,” he observed at a talk organised here by Sahapedia, an open online multimedia knowledge resource on cultures.
The significant source of the notion of democracy as enshrined in the Constitution is not the anti-colonial nationalist movement as goes the general belief. “Rather it was the anti-caste, social reformist movements across the country that founded democracy as a fundamental value,” Kapicadu noted in the lecture on ‘Constitutional Morality’ delivered as part of the ‘Abhimukham’ series by the 2011-instituted Sahapedia that chiefly runs a curated and crowd-funded portal.
The lecture on Monday evening was organised to commemorate the Day of Indian Constitution. The speaker noted that Kerala society enjoys better levels of social equality and fraternity in comparison with other regions of India. This needs to be related to the deep-rooted social reformist movements the region underwent in the late 19th and early 20th century under the leadership of visionaries like Sree Narayana Guru (1854-1928), he added.
“Even so, the Malayali’s sense of justice and awareness about social rights sometimes are often skewed and conveniently selective,” he added. “As we have always been a thoroughly diverse and hierarchical society, our Constitution attempts to uphold this notion of social fraternity among other values and build a society based on it.”
Of late, certain people in the country tend to think that the Constitution is not a revolutionary document as it works in tandem with the state, Kapicadu said. “But this thought stems from the lack of awareness we have about this text, as a society.”
The Constitution designed by Dr B R Ambedkar has two aspects: the aspirational and the operative. The former aspects are enshrined in the Preamble in terms of its assertion of values including, liberty, equality, fraternity, justice and secularism. It is precisely these values that form the Constitutional morality of this grand text, he noted in his 80-minute talk at the Kerala History Museum, Edappally.
Kapicadu said it was time people understood that a call to uphold the Constitution does not necessarily amount to invariably defending the State. “See, we must view the State through the Constitution, and not the other way round,” he emphasised, noting why the Constitution has become a renewed point of public discussion today after the September 28 Supreme Court’s verdict on Sabarimala, permitting entry to women of all ages to the hill-shrine.
He recalled the prophetic statement by Dr Ambedkar (1891-1956) that said India in future will have to face a question which constitutes the superior set of rights, whether the constitution or the so-called divine right of the Brahmin. To Kapicadu, it is this question that is posed before Kerala today, through the ongoing crisis at Sabarimala.
Recent verdicts like that on the decriminalisation of homosexuality is based on the individual-rights paradigm Dr Ambedkar pushed forth in the Constitution as opposed to the village-centric idea presented by the followers of Mahatma Gandhi, the speakers said. India’s cultural, linguistic and regional diversity is arranged in a vertical, hierarchical fashion and Constitutional morality theoretically and philosophically enables all the marginalised and downtrodden communities and regions with special rights and privileges including reservations to overcome this hierarchy, he added.
