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resent, with criticism, etc? And will you be fulfilling the ideals that drew people
together? Those ideals we captured in the preamble of our constitution, where
we drew from the French revolution, from the American revolution. And the
preamble is very simple. It just says, we the people of India promise to grant
every Indian freedom of speech, religion, etc., and we promise justice, social
economic and political. We promise equality of status and opportunity, etc. So,
these are some of the things that we promised. And that translating promise
into reality has been the democratic project.
So, if you take this thing like equality status and opportunity. Historically,
we had a cast system, where lower cast was not allowed to participate in
certain aspects of life, where disadvantage will look down upon, where some
are even called untouchable and excluded from other aspects of society.
We had groups like religious minorities. So, if you look at the constitution right
up front where we say everyone is equal. We also bring in sort of affirmative
action for these historically disadvantaged groups, or numerically minority groups
often on the basis of religion.
And part of modern India’s tension has been, are you giving too much
away? Those who feel that they did not get the benefits of affirmative action
counter by arguing that too much is being giving away, and minorities are being
appeal. Things like that. And actually, that is a part of political tension that we
see today.
When we think about equality, we would like to see equality on gender,
men and women. We have just 10-15% of parliament to our members who are
women. But recently, there is a huge uprising in the south-western state of
Kerala because a supreme court ruled that a temple had to open its doors to
menstruating women who have been excluded all these years. And there was a
huge agitating on the ground there with a lot of people saying this goes against
the spirit of the God, and whose temple it is. This is a sort of conflict that
animates modern India, our liberal ideas of equality versus traditional notions of
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what is right or wrong in certain context.
Now, the federal structure has been evolving. Recently, our constitution
has been amended more than a hundred times. And I got to participate in the
recent constitutional amendment which changed the way taxes are levied in the
country. What kind of powers the central would have, and what kind of powers
the states would have. We created something called a Goods and Services Tax
Council where both groups gave up some of their powers to this new body, to
try and create an internal common market. Again, you see that the economic
aspect of India also evolving. We are very, very mindful of the fact that there
are lots of inequalities within the country. But certain regions and states are
