In her first Independence Day address to the nation as President, Droupadi Murmu, the 15th President of India, said that the next milestone for the country would be to complete 100 years of Independence and that by the year 2047, India would give shape to the vision of our Constitution makers, including Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar.
Why were Directive Principles added to the Constitution?
- Article 37 of the Constitution states that the DPSPs shall not be enforceable by any court, but the principles laid down are fundamental in the governance of the country and it is the duty of the government to apply these principles in making laws.
- These Principles contained in Part IV of the Constitution (Articles 36-41) lay down various goals that the state should strive to achieve while governing the country, such as securing a social order for the promotion of the welfare of people, achieving economic equality, equal justice by providing free legal aid, securing the rights to education, and framing a Uniform Civil Code.
- At the time of framing the Constitution, the challenge before its drafters was to satisfy all the people of India, lay down the foundations of an equitable society and welfare state, and strike a balance between individualism and socialism, which is what led them to borrow the concept of DPSPs from the 1937 Constitution of Ireland.
Dr. Ambedkar said in the Constituent Assembly debates that while we had established a political democracy upon gaining independence, “it was also the desire that we lay down economic democracy as our ideal” and give direction as to what our social order ought to be like. He said that there were various ways and schools of thought to achieve this idea, because of which Directive Principles were not made to be “rigid” or enforceable by law, but fundamental to governance. He had described them as “socialistic” and a “novel feature” of the Constitution.
Multiple members had argued in the November 1948 debate on DPSPs, that without legal enforceability, the principles would remain mere “pious wishes”. It was contended that socio-economic principles such as these had been ignored and exploited under colonial rule and it was necessary to give them effect in independent India.
Multiple Supreme Court judgements have given importance to DPSPs in the past, arguing that they give meaning to Fundamental Rights and the two should be harmonized and balanced if they were to maintain social order and empower people.
Have they been reflected in our policies?
Directive Principles were embedded in the Constitution as ideal and transformative social and economic goals that would be incumbent upon future governments to achieve through their policies.
M.C Chagla, former Chief Justice of India during the early years of Independence, had said that “if all these principles are fully carried out, our country would indeed be a heaven on earth.”
Article 38
- The first Principle directs the state to promote the welfare of people by creating a social order where there is social, political, and economic justice.
- It says that the state shall strive to minimise income inequalities and those in status and opportunities among people and regions.
The debate over welfare schemes versus “freebies” is not a new one and has raged for decades. Multiple governments have enacted welfare schemes such as Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA), the national public distribution scheme, the Mid-day Meal Scheme, the Food Security Act, and farm and gas subsidies.
MGNREGA, for example, started by the UPA government in 2006, guarantees 100 days of employment a year in unskilled work to at least one member of every rural household.
Parliament was recently informed that the demand for jobs under MGNREGA for May had increased from 1.64 core in 2015 to 3.07 crore in 2022. However, more than ₹4 crore was pending from the Centre’s side in wages to the States under the scheme.
While in the case of States doling out freebies to influence the electorate, experts have said that India could face the prospect of sub-national bankruptcies.
The chairperson of the 15th Fifteenth Finance Commission, NK Singh, recently said that ‘cheap’ freebies are expensive for the economy, quality of life, and social cohesion over the long run.
Chief Justice of India NV Ramana said, days before August 15, that there has to be a final disciple to freebies and they cannot be called welfare schemes.
As for achieving income equality, the World Inequality Report revealed that India is now among the most unequal countries in the world. Per the report, 57 per cent of national income was accumulated in the hands of the affluent top 10 per cent of the population.
The report stated that while “socialist-inspired Five Year plans contributed” to reducing the share of the top 10 per cent who had 50 per cent of the income under colonial rule, to 35-40 per cent in the early decades of Independence, since the mid-1980s deregulation and liberalisation policies, “one of the most extreme increases in income and wealth inequality” has been observed.
Article 44
This principle pertains to securing a Uniform Civil Code or a uniform law for all religious communities in personal matters of divorce, marriage, succession and so on.
However, the stand taken by Dr Ambedkar in the Constituent Assembly debates has survived the years and India still does not have a UCC — he believed that a UCC was desirable but should, for the moment, remain voluntary.
Currently, each religion has a separate set of personal laws and the codification of personal laws has historically generated protests.
In the Shah Bano case of 1985, the Supreme Court lamented that Article 44 remained a “dead letter”. The Court ruled that section 125 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, relating to maintenance applied to all, regardless of religion.
But the Rajiv Gandhi government introduced a new law for Muslim women— the Muslim Women (Protection on Divorce Act), 1986—which nullified this judgement. Only one State- Goa, currently has a UCC.
Article 45
This article says that the State should endeavor to provide free and compulsory education, within 10 years of the Constitution’s commencement, for all children until they complete 14 years of age.
However, education was made a right well past 10 years of the Constitution’s coming into force.
In 2002, with the 86th Amendment of the Constitution, Article 21A was added, making free and compulsory education for children aged six to 14 years a Fundamental Right.
Then in 2009, the Right of Education (RTE) Act was passed. Yet, more than a decade later, there is significant debate about the parameters through which that promise is supposed to be realised.
Education Minister said in August last year that while 35 crore children were getting educated in schools, there was a whopping 15 crore out-of-school children in the country.
The Act’s mandatory provision requires government/aided/ private schools to reserve 25 per cent of their seats for children between six to 14 for free education. This has created a problem, with several children being denied education.
UNESCO estimated that 1.3 billion children and young people — that is, 70 per cent of the world’s student population— were affected by COVID-related closures of educational institutions.
Article 39A
The Constitution (42nd Amendment) Act, 1976, inserted Article 39A to provide “equal justice and free legal aid”.
To this end, the Legal Services Authorities Act, 1987, was enacted by Parliament and it came into force in 1995 “to provide free and competent legal services to weaker sections of the society” and to “organise Lok Adalats (literally, ‘People’s Court’) to secure justice on the basis of equal opportunity”.
National Lok Adalats (NLA) are an alternate dispute resolution mechanism, regularly organised to help parties reach a compromise. NLAs deal with motor-accident claims, disputes related to public-utility services, dishonour of cheques, and land, labour and matrimonial disputes (except divorce).
2021 data from the National Legal Services Authority (NALSA) shows that Lok Adalats organised across the country from 2016 to 2020 disposed of 52,46,415 cases, demonstrating speed and efficiency. NLAs also settle a huge number of cases across the country in a single day.
With formal Indian judiciary experiencing a well-recorded pendency, litigants approach Lok Adalats, as a party-driven alternative.
However, experts have long been concerned about the quality of justice in Lok Adalats.
The Supreme Court, in State of Punjab vs Jalour Singh (2008), held that a Lok Adalat is purely conciliatory and it has no adjudicatory or judicial function. As compromise is its central idea, there is a valid concern that in the endeavour for speedy disposal of cases, it undermines the idea of justice.
Article 43
It calls for providing a living wage, suitable working conditions, and a decent standard of living for all workers– industrial, agricultural or otherwise.
Dr. Ambedkar, a long-time advocate for labour rights, inculcated in the DPSPs the idea of “real economic freedom”, meaning workers are not forced to take up any job paying less than minimum wage owing to economic compulsions.
Labour laws, according to experts, are meant to mitigate the imbalance of power, which has only risen with the advent of the platform or gig economy, and the rise of casualisation and precarious employment.
Indian labour laws have been criticised for setting up a labour bureaucracy prone to corruption, for workers losing jobs under the cover of liberalisation and globalisation, and for inefficient adjudicatory mechanisms.
This was seen during the pandemic when multiple states granted sweeping exemptions from legal provisions aimed at protecting labourers and employees for achieving economic revival.
Further, India is among the countries with the lowest participation of women in the national labour workforce.
Other Principles
The remaining DPSPs relate to maternity-related provisions, equal pay for equal work, setting up of co-operative societies and village panchayats, increasing child nutrition levels, environmental protection, and respecting international law.
Some of these principles were also translated in the early years of Independence such as the separation of the judiciary from the executive and the setting up of village panchayats.
Maternal welfare schemes have also been launched, fulfilling some of the mandates of the DPSPs.
Receive Daily Updates
Recent Posts
The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.