Will Congress apologise for strangling Constitution during Emergency: BJP MP Prasad
Addressing a press conference here organised to commemorate 50 years of the Emergency, he said that one-and-a-half lakh people were arrested across the country during the Emergency, including all the leaders of the major opposition parties like Jan Sangh and Samajwadi Party.
Among them was Loknayak Jayaprakash Narayan who was kept in jail in Haryana, he recalled and said that Morarji Desai was also kept in the same jail.
No one was allowed to meet the two leaders, he said.
RSS volunteers and Jana Sangh workers were physically tortured in jail, he alleged.
Prasad further alleged that the Constitution was strangled by making several amendments during the Emergency and wondered will Congress leaders apologise for turning the entire country into a prison and torturing opposition activists during the Emergency, and for forcibly performing sterilisation surgeries and atrocities on the common people.
He said that 253 journalists were arrested during the Emergency, out of them, 110 journalists were arrested under the MISA Act, 110 under the Protection of Information Act and 33 were arrested under other serious offences, he added.
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The Print
36 minutes ago
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The very first sentence of the Constitution has been studded with a lie for the last fifty years. We don't mind misattributing even grave things to the deceased Constitution makers. The Preamble, a one-sentence credo, carries the date 26 November 1949 in present tense, despite being altered 26 years afterwards. All this while leaders have been propagating with gusto that it is given by a demigod-like leader, BR Ambedkar. The irony of Indian politics can be understood by the condition of the Preamble of the Constitution. Our habit of playing with words and phrases is in full play here. Just review the issue. The Preamble of the original Constitution (1950) described India as a democratic republic. Twenty-six years later, two heavy political terms were added to it: 'secular' and 'socialist'. India was re-christened as 'democratic socialist secular republic' only on 26 November 1949. Now, fifty years after that deceit—intended or not—there is again a clamour to revert it to the original. No surprise if this turns out to be just another game of our leaders. The change was made during the Emergency. And the amendment was passed in the Parliament without genuine deliberation, as the Opposition was put in jail. It was perhaps a plot of an intellectual coterie that convinced Indira Gandhi to do it—she was not an ideologue like her father to flaunt such heavy terms. Also read: JP wasn't a saviour of Constitution. He called Mao his guru Tampering with basic structure The amendment proved to be a great distortion of the Constitution. Look at the facts: First, all political theorists considered the original Preamble remarkable. The famed British political scientist Ernest Barker began his 1952 book Principles of Social and Political Theory with the Preamble of the Indian Constitution. He said that it stated 'in a brief and pithy form the argument of much of the book'. This was a unique commendation for the original Preamble. Second, in political science or law teaching in India, the Preamble was called the soul and foundation of the Constitution. Therefore, to tamper with it was interfering with its soul. Third, the Supreme Court of India in the Berubari Union case (1960) described the Preamble as not part of the Constitution but an overall guiding principle of it, through which other provisions of the Constitution may be understood. So, the Preamble was itself a standard, a scale. And whoever heard of tampering with a scale? Fourth, the Supreme Court again, in 1973, in the Kesavananda Bharati case, declared that while the Preamble of the Constitution is not exempt from amendment, its basic structure cannot be changed. It grates against what was done three years later with it. Their Lordships, too, turned a Nelson's eye to this great contradiction. On all those four counts, it is undeniable that the alteration made to the Preamble was grave. The consequences have been graver still. 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an hour ago
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