LOLLL, somehow you had to fall-back on some purely BS-laden stance; eventually........
It is the article, wherever it came from, that is BS. Whoever wrote it seemingly either did not read the intellectual origin of the US Constitution or got his ideas about it from wiki. What most people that have not spent time reading up on the intellectual origin of the US Constitution usually misunderstand is that the US Constitution if primarily libertarian in scope.
Libertarian, not egalitarian.
The libertarian stance is one of restrained government and is more a political statement about the relationship between the government and the governed. The egalitarian stance is more of a moral/philosophical view of the state of being of individuals. The US Constitution is primarily a guide for Americans on how to deal with their government and later, or lesser depending on how you want to look at it, on their individual state of moral being while under the laws of both man and God.
For example...If I am a slave owner, under the libertarian view, the US government have restrained rights and authority over me and my slaves. Free and enslaved are states of being.
It is only when the great immorality of slavery was convinced to be offensive to God and contrary to the founding morality that created the Constitution were amendments introduced to abolish slavery and extended the power of the federal government in this regard.
So when people used slavery and blacks to criticize US, they did it with the convenience of hindsight and over the American dead who fought to rid the US of institutionalized slavery, not because somehow their leaders were any more enlightened than the American founders.
And that is based on the some-what common American belief of being the "last word on everything" or that the "Sun shines out of an American Fundamental Orifice" !
Why do you overlook what I have stated: that American influences (among otheers) helped to make the Indian Constitution a more topical, a more sensitised Document than it might have been otherwise.
Does that then make everything American perfect? Or the "American way of life" the perfect way?
If that were indeed so; then the "Sun would truly shine out of an American Fundamental Orifice" !
No, America is not perfect. But just as the US is far from perfection, the country is equally far ahead of most of the world in terms of everything that is relevant to mankind. Many of your fellow countrymen agrees. I work with them often enough.
Sorry, but there is nothing in terms of principles and philosophy that Indian democracy can 'teach' US. At best, Indian democracy can show US the diversely unique democratic methods devised to deal with social issues that are unique to India, or may be similar enough to American issues. Take your caste system, for example. It is only paper thin degree away from institutionalized slavery in old America. Of all the single Indian engineers that I worked with that marry while I know them, every one of them were pressured to return to India and marry women of the same caste, and this is the 21st century. If the Indian Constitution enumerated egalitarian ideas 'on the first pass', as pretentiously boasted, it was because of external influence.
There are plenty of differences between the US and the Indian constitutions that we do not to want learn from India and this is one of them...
residual power
noun
power retained by a governmental authority after certain powers have been delegated to other authorities.
Residuary power in the Indian Constitution is contrary to the US Constitution.
Residuary power is when the central government clearly enumerated and doled out certain powers to subsidiary agents, such as state/province governments and anything that is unspoken is reserved to the central government. There is a higher risk of despotism in that that the central government can essentially create new powers without consent from the people, and depending on the independence of the judiciary, without legal justification and constitutional support.
Constitution of India, 1949
248.Residuary powers of legislation.-
(1)Parliament has exclusive power to make any law with respect to any matter not enumerated in the Concurrent List or State List.
(2) Such power shall include the power of making any law imposing a tax not mentioned in either of those Lists.
For the US Constitution with its libertarian view, it is the opposite...
AMENDMENT X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
We can never eliminate despotism completely but at least we can try to contain it to the state level -- goes the Tenth Amendment. In my opinion, that is the best relationship between government and citizen.
Another difference that I do not want in the US, from the Indian Constitution, is that constitutional amendments can be made without consent of the people. If there are reasonably democratic mechanisms that at least inform the Indian citizenry of constitutional changes, that is fine with me, but since Americans do not care for this idea in the first place, any creative democratic mechanism, no matter how morally praiseworthy, keep it in India.
