Question

Why do we still follow a constitution which was made many many years ago back

Answer 1

Answer:

• Republic Day commemorates January 26, 1950, the day when India became a constitutional democratic republic. A history of that moment would trace how contact with the British introduced constitutionalism into Indian public life from the late eighteen century onward. It would show how the East India Act of 1773, the Charter Act of 1833 and then the Government of India Act of 1858 produced a “Constitution” that governed British India. It would then observe how subsequent revisions of this “Constitution” via the Government of India Acts of 1919 and 1935 laid the foundation for the Constitution of India in 1949.

• What this story would miss, however, is that long before 1949, there was on the table another constitution for another India. This constitution was drafted in March 1874. It was the product not of British India, but of Indian India – as the Princely States were termed. This fact will startle those who assume that the Princely States were exemplars of an unrelenting absolutism. But the reality is that it was in the Princely States that Indians had the chance to exercise a modest degree of self-government, which is why the first constitution drafted in modern India emerged there.