"My friends tell me that I have made the Constitution. But I am quite prepared to say that I shall be the first person to burn it out. I do not want it. It does not suit anybody. I was a hack. What I was asked to do, I did much against my will."
Stated in the Rajya Sabha in 1953 by Dr B. R. Ambedkar.The Constitution was mainly drafted by a team of Bureaucrats led by the Indian Civil Service officer, Benegal Rau and was 65% a verbatim copy of the colonial Government of India Act of 1935. Most crucially, it omitted the rights to education, health, employment and self governance from the chapter on fundamental rights and put them in the non-justiciable chapter on directive principles of state policy. This is why we now have a huge population, especially women, of unskilled, underfed and unhealthy and underemployed people struggling to make ends meet.
The Bureaucrats and most of the 95% Savarna members of the Constituent Assembly were feudal stooges of the British and so even if Ambedkar was the Chairperson of the drafting committee what actually emerged eventually was an anti-people constitution. Even reservations for SCs and STs were not part of the original constitution but were put in as amendments later.
Thus, the struggle for socioeconomic justice started by Ambedkar continues to this day and we have to take the pledge on his birth anniversary to finish what he started.
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