Justice B Sudershan Reddy - Death of Democratic Institutions: Abandonment of Directive Principles
Channel: KG Kannabiran Lectures
Date: 2020-11-08

Keywords:  Directive Principles of State Policy; Dignity; Fraternity; Preamble; empathy; neo-liberalism; Constitution; rule of law

Title: Death of Democratic Institutions: The Inevitable Logic of Neo-Liberal Political Economy and Abandonment of Directive Principles of State Policy

Description:  For nearly three decades now we have been guided by a philosophical and moral framework in which the dignity of the human being is subservient to the basal calculus of the market.  The Directive Principles of the State Policy – the vital soul of a transformative constitution - have been elided even from effective discourse.  The very programmatic elements of the Constitutional project that seeks to achieve the preambular promise of fraternity with dignity ( and recognizes as a self-evident truth that unity and integrity of the nation is dependent on instantiation of social justice in all institutions of national importance) is effectively deemed to be irrelevant, and even inimical to national purpose, at least by the tenets of the neoliberal polity that the elites and power holders seemed to have subscribed to lock stock and barrel.  The notion of dignity of human beings as an essential element of justice has been degraded.  The angst that many of us feel, and the shock at the near demise of rule of law will not suffice. We ought to be worried about whether the platform for public discourse and democratic decision-making can extract commitment to the rule of law when collective action requires considerable sacrifice of the individual self-interest? We are likely to face many, many more vital questions implicating the need to commit to collective action. We will need to depend more on our empathetic core, and our potential instinct for mutual recognition of indefeasible human dignity of each other and must pause to think about whether we are being compelled to abandon the possibility of building a society based on empathy for the human condition.