There’s no row, Constitution review on — Govt

However, the Congress took the Government to task with senior leader Pranab Mukherjee and former Union minister Jaipal Reddy both ridiculing the Government’s proposal. Mukherjee said that the Congress was committed to the Parliamentary form of government and cautioned the Vajpayee Government to follow the President’s advice instead of setting up a commission with half-baked ideas.

Mukherjee wanted to know the rationale behind the Government’s proposal on the Constitution. “Instead of rushing, they should listen to the President who gave away to get out of the mess,” he said.

However, Jethmalani tried to brush aside the President’s objections, saying that the Government was committed to a review and would announce the setting up of the committee for this purpose in the next few days.

“This controversy needs to be nipped in the bud… it is based upon a total misunderstanding of what the President said,” Jethmalani claimed.

“My reading of the President’s speech is that he has approved of the process of keeping the Constitution under review and making changes where necessary. If the President was opposed to any amendment of the Constitution per se, he would have been highly critical of what has been done to the Constitution almost 80 times in a span of 50 years,” the Law Minister argued.

“The review committee will be constituted in the next few days and will consist of around 12 experts who will elicit the views of various groups in society…the reason for the delay has been getting some of these eminent persons to agree to be onthe committee,” Jethmalani said.

Union Home Minister L K Advani too defended the move, saying a review was part of the NDA’s manifesto. “We have been given the mandate to rule. It is not related merely to numbers, but to implement the NDA manifesto of which review of the Constitution is an important item,” he said.

He denied any difference of perception between the President and the Prime Minister over the issue, saying that the PM had merely endorsed what the President had said in his address to Parliament after the Government came back to power.

Jethmalani told reporters that one of the areas in the Constitution which needed to be looked into afresh was Article 356 and its misuse by the Centre. “The power to supersede a state government under Article 356 requires to be narrowly confined to genuine cases of failure of constitutional machinery.”

Other areas which need to be re-examined, he said, included changing the mode of appointment, transfer and removal of judges, relations between theCentre and the states over financial matters, electoral reforms, empowerment of women and the issue of reservation to SCs/STs and removal of their just grievances.

He, however, added that the Government had no intention whatsoever to tinker with the basic features of the Constitution. “The President is absolutely right that no review can recommend tinkering with the basic features of the Constitution,” he said.

“Those who constitute the present Government have fully and unreservedly accepted the validity of the Keshavanand doctrine based on the historic Supreme Court judgement of 1973 which made clear that the basic features of the Constitution cannot be amended under any circumstances,” the Law Minister asserted.

Congress MP S Jaipal Reddy slammed the government for its “dogged attempt” to embark upon a “wild goose” review of the Constitution. This should not be considered an an innocuous academic exercise given the ideological track record of the BJP on constitutional issues, he said.

TheNCP also condemned the Government proposal. Party’s Legal Cell All India Convenor R D Agrawala said that the President’s intervention is most “timely, path-breaking and of utmost historical significance”. The move to set up a review committee, he said, was tantamount to tinkering with the Constitution and also smacked of ulterior motives.