Article 19: The issue of our Basic Rights

As 26 January approaches, it’s time to look at what the day means, other than navy parades and VIPs and overseas visitors.

Republic Day is a celebration of our being a nation the place supreme energy rests with the individuals. That is assured via our Structure. What we have fun on that day is our Structure and, specifically, the rights we take pleasure in as residents and people.

Our Basic Rights are these which guarantee us of equality, freedom from discrimination, the correct to free speech, free affiliation and free meeting, the correct to life and liberty, the correct to occupation, the correct to schooling, the liberty to propagate, practise and handle our personal faith and the liberty to maneuver the Supreme Court docket if our Basic Rights are wrongly encroached upon or violated by the State.

This set of rights seems to be potent. However can we really possess them?

The reply is not any. We aren’t solely free. Allow us to take a look at how simply the State has trespassed on rights we thought had a excessive diploma of safety from encroachment.

Article 19 is an umbrella Basic Proper on freedom of speech, meeting, affiliation, motion and occupation. It reads: ‘All residents shall have the correct to: freedom of speech and expression; assemble peaceably and with out arms; kind associations or unions; transfer freely all through the territory of India; reside and settle in any a part of the territory of India; practise any occupation, or to hold on any occupation, commerce or enterprise.’

The fact is that none of those rights really exist within the kind they’re alleged to.

India’s first constitutional modification (legislated underneath Jawaharlal Nehru) restricts these Rights by qualifying them — that means that the State was given the authority to curb them via so-called ‘affordable restrictions’.