Chief Justice of India Justice Surya Kant on Friday called upon the legal fraternity to move beyond the token remembrance of Dr BR Ambedkar to the responsibility his vision places on each generation.
Delivering the chief guest’s address at the 1st National Conference organised by the SC, ST & OBC Advocates Association on “The Life, Struggle, and Constitutional Legacy of Bharat Ratna Dr BR Ambedkar” at Bharat Mandapam, the CJI said it was fitting that the conference was convened by members of the Bar, “for he fought many of his most consequential battles through the law”.
“The most enduring fruit of those battles, I believe, is our Constitution, and a Conference devoted to his legacy should lead us beyond remembrance, to reflect upon the responsibility his vision places on each of us,” he said. “I have always felt that the Constitution is a continuing responsibility, for while its text is complete, the great work of giving life to its ideals passes from one generation to the next.”
The CJI chose to begin not with Ambedkar, the architect of the Constitution, but with Ambedkar, the advocate. Long before he became Independent India’s first Law Minister and chaired the Drafting Committee, CJI Surya Kant said Ambedkar “was a member of the Bar, who knew the weight of a brief as well as the long wait for justice”.
Recalling Ambedkar’s early life, the CJI spoke of his schooling in Satara, where he could not touch the water tap used by his classmates and had to wait for the school peon to open it. “Whenever the peon was absent, he went without water,” he said. “No law required any of this, for the exclusion was enforced by custom alone, which in those days carried all the so-called authority of law.”
Such experiences, he said, convinced Ambedkar that exclusion could be overcome only by educating those whom it excluded, and by securing their rights through law. Ambedkar went on to earn doctorates from Columbia University and the London School of Economics and qualify as a barrister at Gray’s Inn. “Education, he understood, was the first instrument of freedom, for it opens the way to work, to a voice in public life, and to the confidence to claim one’s rights,” the CJI said.
The heart of the address was the Mahad struggle. In 1923, the Bombay Legislative Council had resolved that public watering places should be open to the Depressed Classes, and the Mahad municipality opened its Chavdar tank. Yet three years later, the Depressed Classes still could not draw water from it. Ambedkar went to the tank with his supporters and drank its water. When the municipality withdrew its resolution and a court restrained him, the CJI said, “although the Court’s order had gone against him, he chose to obey it.”
He quoted Ambedkar’s explanation at the December 1927 conference that the real purpose was “to assert that we too are human beings like others”.
From that 10-year wait until the Bombay High Court dismissed the appeal against him in 1937, Ambedkar drew three lessons, the CJI said: a right granted by resolution can be withdrawn as easily as it was given; a right is only as strong as the remedy behind it; and even a just cause can take far too long to succeed in court.
Those lessons, he said, became Articles 15(2), 17 and 32. Article 15(2) bars denial of access to wells, tanks and bathing ghats on grounds of caste, Article 17 abolished untouchability, and Article 32 made the right to approach the Supreme Court itself a fundamental right, which Ambedkar described as, “the very soul of the Constitution and the very heart of it.”
“For a person who has been wronged and has nowhere else to turn, a right that she cannot reach, understand, or afford to claim remains a right only on paper,” the CJI said, adding that carrying rights “from the paper to the person is the part of his work that now falls to the Bench and the Bar.”
On democracy, the CJI recalled Ambedkar’s 1936 definition of his ideal as “a society based on Liberty, Equality and Fraternity”, and his words: “Democracy is not merely a form of Government. It is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience. It is essentially an attitude of respect and reverence towards fellowmen.”
He warned that India had entered “a life of contradictions,” equal in politics but unequal in social and economic life. He described this as “a gap between the clock of law, which began to strike on 26 January 1950, and the clock of society, which moves only as fast as conscience moves.”
Only Fraternity, he said, could bring the two clocks into step, for without it Liberty and Equality could not become “a natural course of things,” and “it would require a constable to enforce them.”
CJI Surya Kant urged young advocates to remember their struggles and “always set aside time for those who cannot afford a lawyer,” and said the Association would honour Ambedkar best by acting as “a bridge that brings its members into the fellowship of the entire Bar.”
“His example stands as a reminder to every person who passes through the doors of our courts, whether a litigant, a lawyer, or a judge, of the values on which our democracy rests, and of the respect that each citizen owes to every other.”
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