At B'luru event, Orissa HC judge calls for practice of constitutional morality

Orissa High Court Chief Justice Dr S Muralidhar has called for the greater practice of constitutional morality. The Constitution must be practiced in spirit and one must look beyond the legislature to realise the preamble, he added.

He was speaking at a programme to mark the 22nd anniversary of the Alternative Law Forum (ALF) at St Joseph’s College of Law here on Saturday.

The ALF provides legal services to marginalised groups while participating in critical research and maintaining legal intervention on social issues.

“We need to ask ourselves why using the law for social change has not worked,” Justice Muralidhar said. “We normally understand rights as being enforced on citizens. But we must think of the horizontality of rights; how we should be towards each other.”

Illustrating the horizontality of rights, Justice Muralidhar cited Articles 15 and 17 of the Constitution. Article 15 (prohibition of discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth) and Article 17 (abolishment of untouchability) are examples of the Constitution being rooted in the Indian context while prescribing how culture ought to be, he said.

Also speaking on the occasion, Dalit poet and activist D U Saraswathi said: “We need to rethink the objectives of our justice system. Can we expect the perpetrators of the (crime) in the Bilkis Bano case to have been magically reformed within the four walls of the prison?”

She continued: “Culture tells us how we ought to be, it doesn’t just define traditions. We should acknowledge the plurality of cultures we have, and understand the interactions between culture and law, especially for the marginalised.”

Cultural practices

Both speakers alluded to the limits of the legislative system in delivering justice. Invoking the feminist slogan, ‘the personal is the political,’ Saraswathi argued that people must reexamine cultural practices to fulfill the mandates of the Constitution.

In Justice Muralidhar’s opinion, looking at laws as only top-down enforcement is too reductive. He said many laws were borne out of people’s movements, indicating a bottom-up movement to the law as well. “The Right to Information Act came as a result of mass movements and protests,” he said. “All people’s movements aren’t futile. They do bring about a change.”

As such, constitutional values are not just restricted to courts but should permeate our daily lives, he added.