had not kept true faith with it.

Of course, post-Emergency, the Supreme Court has amply redeemed itself by its pronouncements: and it has kept elected governments, and its ministers and officials in place. But be it remembered — all this, only post-Emergency!

Malhotra says that whatever the Emergency’s faults “which were many and grievous, its biggest benefit is that it just can’t be repeated”. I am not so sanguine. In any case the reasoning in ADM Jabalpur could theoretically speaking be repeated. Because that decision has never been expressly overruled; strangely — and inexplicably during these

34 years — it has never even been expressly dissented from.

It is time we realised that the Constitution is not only for judges and lawyers, but for us citizens as well — for “the butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker” as Justice Vivian Bose eloquently put it in a celebrated judgment of the Supreme Court way back in 1954. It is only the spirit of constitutionalism amongst the people of this country that can save our liberties, and help preserve the integrity of our great country. We must all strive — the media in parti-cular — to nurture and propagate this spirit of constitutionalism, so that what happened between June 1975 and January 1977 can never happen again.

The writer is an eminent jurist express@expressindia.com