Constitution: Laws that Citizens Need To Understand For Useful Purposes

Anyone who has a clear perception of what laws are required to achieve, will agree that laws must first be understood by all citizens in order for them to serve any useful purpose. India is not the only country where this does not happen. There is such a perverse obsession about making our laws not intelligible to the common man that our lawmakers have a duty to justify their penchant for a system that makes the law so difficult to understand. We are completely mystified about lawmakers anxious to make the laws of the land so esoteric as not to be understood by even university graduates. Anyone who appreciates the needs of a democratic system for a better understanding of its legal imperatives by the people must also appreciate the need to make the language of law much easier than it is today. We have succeeded eminently in putting the laws of the land beyond the reach of common people by couching it in language that is difficult even for graduates. It is important to make two significant changes to our approach to our laws. One is to ensure that all laws will be available to people in their own language. The other is to ensure that our laws are in the kind of language that everyone understands quite easily.