This paper back edition captioned Eternal India and the Constitution, is in fact, the preface and addendum written by Shri S. Gurumurthy and Shri Shree Dev Sharma for the book Supreme Court on Hindutva. Shri S. Gurumurthy has dealt with the subject of Traditional India and the Constitutionalism so thoroughly with penetrating philosophical, societal and political insight that most of the over dozen knowledgeable persons who went through this 24000 words draft suggested that a paper back edition should be brought out for it alone.

Shri Shree Dev Sharma's article, in a way reveals the real character of our Constitution. The copy of Constitution, which we buy from a Book Store or the one we find in the shelf of a library, is just the physical body of the Constitution. The civilisational heart and soul are missing there. If one happens to see the final and original copy of the Constitution duly signed by all members of the Constituent Assembly, one would instantly reach to the conclusion mentioned above. The original copy of the Constitution contains paintings, representing Eternal India in different phases alongwith its civilizational values. Apparently, the framers of the Constitution have symbolically underlined the 'Hindu Heritage' of India. The Constitution includes 22 illustrations within its main body. Going through these illustrations, listed at the beginning of the Constitution, one gets an interesting and illuminating insight. Evidently, the illustrations are chosen to represent various eras of the Indian History.

Dina Nath Mishra
(Founder President)
India First Foundation

This volume presents a collection of some important rulings of the Supreme Court of India on the concepts, thoughts and institutions linked to ancient India and Indian civilisation. These rulings bring out the endeavours of constitutionalism in India to acknowledge, understand and recognise the legitimate, yet hidden and unexpressed, urges of 'traditional' India. And that is precisely the reason why these rulings of the highest judiciary have been compiled, critiqued and presented as a compendium for demonstrating the strenuous endeavours of Constitutional India to find its roots in traditional India.

The 'modern' 'secular' Constitution, on which the Constitutional India functions, is based on the Anglo- Saxon experiences. This Anglo-Saxon constitutional instrumentality that free India had adopted to institute a modern nation-state to govern this ancient nation contained seeds of ideological tensions and conflicts between 'traditional' India and the 'modern' India - here 'modern' means what is essentially Western. The India that is repeatedly and alternately referred to here as 'modern' and 'secular' commonly shares embarrassment and allergy for Indian traditions and traditional Indians.

Free India's leadership was a mix of those indigenously nurtured and those overawed by the West -with the latter holding the reigns of power within and outside the State apparatus. In the euphoria generated by freedom, the leadership could not fully realise the dangerous potentialities the Anglo-Saxon modernism drafted into the Constitution exposed the nation to, unless handled sensitively. The seeds of discord between the 'secular' 'modern' constitution and the traditional India soon germinated and gradually sprouted as subterranean tensions between the 'modern' India and the traditional. These tensions turned into conflicts that intensified post freedom, and resulted in the virtual de-legitimisation of the traditional India in polity and public life.

The contradictions between an Anglo Saxon modelled 'secular' Constitution and an India largely driven by traditions could have been de-risked to the minimum -though not fully eliminated -by wise and sensitive leadership and empathetic intellectualism with sympathy for Indian traditions. The contradiction between the modem India and the traditional one was never unmanageable then, nor is it now. For, the 't Indian tradition was never a frozen institution like its cousins in different parts of the world. It was and is even now an open-minded, debate-friendly thought which contained within itself seeds of change dictated by the march of time. The Indian civilisation had always demonstrated unbelievable capacity for change in tune with times even while maintaining its traditions and being proud of its continuity. Thus it has always been a 'changing India' and equally a 'changeless India'. But it required mature political leadership, empathetic intellectualism and fair polity to handle the contradiction between the 'modem' Constitution and traditional India and to effect changes without offending continuity. On the contrary, the real polity practised in free India fertilised and fomented, instead of minimising, the discord, by vote-bank politics that virtually invented, instead of assimilating, and promoted, rather than subsuming, the majority and minority divide for political gain. It also discriminated against traditional India largely represented by Hindu civilisational moorings and even trivialised it. 'Secular' intellectualism controlled by the Left and the agnostic and atheistic lot only abetted this divisive polity and added fuel to the fire. Whenever traditional India found an isolated spokesman to speak on its behalf and voice its grievances against the wholesale deligitimisation of ancient India, the 'secular' India converged against and set upon such rare voice in defence of the traditional India and charged it with dividing the nation! With the result the greatest unifying idea of India came to be ridiculed as divisive.

This resulted in further and deeper isolation and disconnection of the 'modem', 'secular' State from the traditional society in India. The emotional disengagement between the traditional and 'modem' India peaked in mid 1980s when the nation underwent tumultuous times marked by terrorism and insurgencies which raised far-reaching questions on the scope and content of secularism even in the mind of many of its adherents. This brought hidden hostility of 'secular', 'modern' India to the traditional India out into the open. The accumulated hostility of the 'modern' India to the traditional compelled the traditional India to lodge an uproarious protest at being ignored and discriminated against by the 'modern' India. This shocked the 'modern' India into realising that it could no more ignore the traditional India. How did conflicts arise between traditional India and the 'modern' and how did such conflicts force the traditional India to lodge open protest to make its point to the 'modern', constitutional India need to be analysed in some detail.

The judgments by the highest Court of the land collated in this volume should be understood j in the historical context in which they were pronounced. These pronouncements constitute post- constitutional conflict resolution efforts undertaken by Indian constitutionalism consistent with the increasing sensitivity of Indian political system to traditional India's aspirations. And they set out the judicially devised formulae to handle the tensions and conflicts that had marked the relations between the traditional India and the 'modern' India in free India which had intensified as 'modern' India's efforts to marginalise the traditional India. The judicial efforts illustrated in this volume also have had the effect of softening the partly hidden and partly open hostility of 'secular', modern India to ancient India and its culture and civilisation.