'The Constitution is a continuing responsibility', CJI Surya Kant tells lawyers at Ambedkar conference

Chief Justice of India Surya Kant on Friday told a gathering of lawyers that “the Constitution is a continuing responsibility”, and that its text may be complete but the work of giving life to its ideals passes from one generation to the next.

He was speaking as chief guest at the first national conference of the SC, ST & OBC Advocates Association at Bharat Mandapam in New Delhi. The conference was themed on the life, struggle and constitutional legacy of Bharat Ratna Dr B R Ambedkar. The Chief Justice asked the legal community to treat that legacy as a call to action and not a ceremonial tribute.

Ambedkar at the Bar

Justice Kant began with Ambedkar the advocate, a litigator before he became Law Minister and chairman of the Drafting Committee. He recalled that Ambedkar was denied water at school, an exclusion enforced by custom and not by law, and that Ambedkar saw education and legal rights as the way out.

The lessons of Mahad

The Chief Justice spent much of his address on the Mahad water-tank struggle. A 1923 resolution of the Bombay Legislative Council said public watering places should be open to the depressed classes, and the Mahad municipality opened its chavdar tank to all. Opposition was strong enough that the right stayed on paper.

Ambedkar went to the tank with his supporters and they drank its water. Within months the municipality withdrew its resolution under pressure. A civil suit followed, a court restrained Ambedkar and his followers from going to the tank, and in 1937 the Bombay High Court dismissed the appeal against him.

Justice Kant said Ambedkar drew three lessons: a right granted by resolution can be withdrawn as easily as it was given, a right is only as strong as its remedy, and even a just cause can take too long to succeed in court. The first two, he said, were written into the Constitution. The third remains a shared responsibility.

Article 32 and access to justice

The remedy lesson, the Chief Justice said, found its answer in Article 32, which lets a citizen go straight to the Supreme Court to enforce fundamental rights. Ambedkar called it “the very soul of the Constitution and the very heart of it.” Justice Kant said a citizen’s rights must not depend on the goodwill of the authority she may have to challenge.

He warned that “a right that she cannot reach, understand, or afford to claim remains a right only on paper.” Making rights real, he said, is now the job of the Bench and the Bar.

Fraternity and the social gap

Justice Kant cited Ambedkar’s description of fraternity as “only another name for democracy”, the idea that democracy lives in everyday dealings between citizens who meet as equals. He also recalled Ambedkar’s closing speech to the Constituent Assembly, which warned that political democracy cannot last without social democracy as its base.

India, he said, has achieved political equality but not yet matched it with social and economic equality. He described the distance between legal change and social change as the gap between the clock of law and “the clock of society, which moves only as fast as conscience moves”.

A call to young advocates

He ended with a request to the younger members of the Bar to “always set aside time for those who cannot afford a lawyer”. The best way for the Association to honour Ambedkar, he said, would be to build unity across the Bar.