CJI DY Chandrachud stated on Thursday that the original intention of the Constitution’s framers was not to create a “set of iron-clad rules governing the social and legal relations,” and that the provisions of the document need to be interpreted dynamically to address the ever-changing challenges faced by society and the polity.
While the framers of the Constitution were men and women of great standing, understanding, and vision, the Chief Justice stated during the M. K. Nambyar Memorial Lecture that “it would be difficult to dispute that many of the problems which contemporary societies face would not have been present in the minds of even the most perspicacious drafters.”
He told, “The constitution of a country, which is more than mere text, is the foundation of this democratic culture and not the culmination of it. It merely stems from the framers’ intent, but as Nambyar showed us, it blossoms in the lived realities of its constituents in their specific social contexts.”
According to the CJI DY Chandrachud, the constitutional institutions need to be flexible in order to satisfy the demands of the quickly expanding information economy, and the constitutional doctrine should also change in step with society.
An irrational clinging to the framers’ intentions is problematic because it makes the Constitution vulnerable to rigidity. The goal of the Constitution was never to provide a rigid set of guidelines for social and legal interactions. It was intended to be a more comprehensive set of ideas that would serve as the cornerstone of our brand-new political reality, the speaker stated.
The father of former attorney general K K Venugopal, Nambyar, had a legal career that Justice Chandrachud compared to the Indian Constitution. He cited Nambyar’s outstanding 1950 Supreme Court argument on the inviolability of fundamental rights in the A K Gopalan case.
The CJI DY Chandrachud explained the function of attorneys and judges in interpreting constitutional clauses by saying, “Lawyers play an indispensable role in shaping constitutional discourse. While judges have the ultimate authority to interpret the Constitution, it is the lawyers who craft and present the interpretive frameworks for the judiciary to consider. In this sense, interpretation is as much a job of a lawyer as it is of a judge, for without robust legal arguments and advocacy, constitutional interpretation would lack the necessary depth and diversity of perspectives.”