The Hindu Business Line : Rewriting the Constitution

The Governor's Address to the Tamil Nadu State Assembly at the opening of the new session on January 20 has sprung a surprise by asking for a rewriting of the Constitution. There was really nothing that could be said to have been brewing either in the sphere of Centre-State relations or in respect of any momentous issue to which this sudden inspiration can be attributed. If anything, the UPA Government at the Centre and the DPA-supported DMK Government in Tamil Nadu had been getting along nicely, with the latter, in fact, having its way on most matters that it had been taking up with the former.

Lack of clarity

The mention in the Address of ``the changing needs'' is not particularly illuminating. Nor is it clear what is meant by maintaining ``true and wholesome federalism'' and enabling the ``wheels of social justice'' to revolve ``without any hindrance''. The Address talks of the people belonging to the backward and most backward classes, Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs) doing ``tightrope walking to defend their hard-won rights'', but gives no indication of any loopholes in the Constitution that need to be plugged. And in regard to the need for reviewing the division of powers between the States and the Union so as to transfer more powers to the States, the only specific pointer it provides is about vesting the States with the power to levy service tax.

It is also difficult to understand the pressing urgency when the exhaustive work done by the National Commission to Review the Working of the Constitution (NCRWC) set up by the NDA Government on February 22, 2000 and the comprehensive recommendations contained in its Report submitted on March 31, 2002, have been lying unattended for nearly five years. Indeed, the sole term of reference for the NCRWC also had to do with ``the changing needs of efficient, smooth and effective system of governance and socio-economic development of modern India within the framework of Parliamentary democracy''.

There is not one aspect of the working of the Constitution that was left uncovered by the ten panels it had set up, comprising many eminent personages who had approached the tasks with a great deal of scholarship and objectivity. For instance, one of the important recommendations of the NCRWC pertains to vesting the States with exclusive powers to tax an enlarged list of services in order to augment their resource pool, by amending the Constitution, if necessary, so that certain taxes, now levied and collected by the Union, are brought within the purview of the States.

Radical recommendations

Likewise, in regard to backward and most backward classes and SCs and STs too, it has made some radical recommendations such as making it mandatory for privatised or disinvested enterprises to continue with the policy of reservation in favour of SCs, STs and backward classes even after privatisation or disinvestment in the same form as it exists in the Government and that this should also be incorporated in the respective statutes of reservation.

As a measure of social integration, it calls for a half per cent reservation for the `casteless' defined as the children of parents one of whom is SC/ST and the other parent is non-SC/non-ST. It also wants a way to be found to bring a reasonable number of SCs, STs and backward classes on to the Benches of the Supreme Court and High Courts.

In short, almost everything that can result from a `rewriting' is already there. All that needs to be done is to revisit the NCRWC's report, and not go about reinventing the wheel.

B. S. RAGHAVAN