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| Constitution is a "Powerful Tool" to curb disparities: Chief Justice | | | Agencies
NEW DELHI, Aug 8: Chief Justice of India D Y Chandrachud on Wednesday said the Constitution is a "powerful tool" to curb disparities and it creates institutions and structures which are meant to guard against inequality.
He said the Constitution provides for checks and balances within these institutions and also stipulates institutional priorities and obligations towards citizens of the country.
Addressing a gathering at the 13th convocation ceremony and founder's day of the O P Jindal Global University here, the CJI exhorted the students to spot injustice in all its facets in the world around them.
"The Constitution is a powerful tool to curb such disparities. It creates institutions and structures that are meant to guard against inequalities - apparent or invisible," he said.
"In that sense, it performs a horizontal function - in that it regulates the inter-institutional relationships; and a vertical function - in so far as it regulates the relationship between the State and the people. But this is not all. The Constitution does a lot more than that, it entrenches these values into our social fabric," Justice Chandrachud said.
-"However, something we take for granted in our democracy is the stability that our Constitution affords to our civic lives. Constitutional longevity speaks to the wisdom of our framers who were prescient enough to incorporate grounding elements into the Constitution without making it into a rigid normative, and thus a brittle document," he said.
The CJI said the Constitution, while being a sturdy foundation for our democracy, is also sufficiently flexible.
"For instance, we may understand that inequality is unjust. But we may have diverse ideas of what equality entails. Does similarity of treatment always promote equality or does it sometimes stray us further away? Does the law only target manifest inequality or inequality that lurks in shrouds of protective discrimination and non-interference?" he said.
He said for instance, the law proscribes discrimination on the ground of sex.
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