Individual freedom - India vs America

Gaurav Sabnis talks about Freedom Vs Sovereignty and compares the freedom Americans enjoy to do their own things as long as it doesn't affect others. Indians, he says, tend to think of freedom in the sense of sovereignty, in a free from British way, whereas Americans value personal freedom. I agree with him. One of the reasons that we Indians don't have the kind of freedom Americans enjoy is our constitution gives our government a lot of power to restrict it. It bears noting that the American consitution is all of 5000 odd words and has been amended 27 times in 200+ years. We are now at 82, I think, after 55 years. The US Congress has enormous power to make laws no doubt. But the laws aren't there in the constitution. So if the Congress there wants to enact a law to restrict freedom, some would say like the PATRIOT ACT, their constituents can raise a stink and make them think twice about enacting the law. There is also the check on their power in the form of the President excercising his veto. In India, on the other hand, many laws are hardwired into the constitution. It is a humongous constitution, maybe the longest in the world.

I am reading a book on the history of our Constitution by Granville Austin. I have just finished the first part dealing with the Nehru years and am surprised by what I've read. Nehru and Patel and his cabinet had a huge fight with the Judiciary over the Government's right to restrict property rights (redistributing Zamindar lands etc) and also many speech rights. Nehru wanted to be able to prosecute papers which endangered national security, by their reporting, or caused disorder or for a few other things. Rajendra Prasad was very concerned about this and consulted a lot of legal experts before signing his assent to those laws.

The Supreme Court and many High Courts struck down many laws made by the state and central governments of the day. The American first amendment guarantees free speech amond other things. In contrast our first amendment, which is an absolute mess to read for an engineer like me because it makes additions and modifications to an existing statute in the consitution, takes away freedom and gives the government the right to make some laws without Court interference. It was written specifically with a lot of court decisions (which went against the government) in mind. They tried to undercut the judicial review of laws made by placing them in the Ninth Schedule of the Constitution, which apparently puts those laws out of the purview of the judiciary. The author says that it took the courts about 30 years to find a way around the Ninth Schedule. He says he deals with it in later chapters, which I haven't come to yet.

It might be politically incorrect to say this, but the huge illiteracy numbers in our country make it easier for the government to restrict freedom and not pay a price for it. If you don't know rights, how do you know if they have been taken away?.

There are reasons to love America and there are reasons to hate it. Their constitution is one thing we can admire them for. I am not a lawyer and I don't play one on the internet. But the American constitution is a fantastic document, while ours is a bigger, fatter, uglier 5th cousin. A lot of intelligent, smart and honest people worked on writing our constitution, but a lot of geniuses worked on the American one.