Former SC judge Chelameswar calls for honest audit of how well fundamental rights protect Indians

Former Supreme Court judge Justice J. Chelameswar on May 30, 2026 said that an honest audit of how effectively the Constitution's fundamental rights actually protect ordinary citizens would yield very uncomfortable findings. He made the remarks while inaugurating a two-day national conference at the Government Law College, Ernakulam, on the future of legal education in India.

Justice Chelameswar said the Constitution clearly guarantees fundamental rights on paper. The real question, he argued, is how those guarantees translate into protection for the common man in everyday life. He admitted he did not have statistics to offer but said his view was based on his experiences during decades on the bench.

He pointed in particular to how easily a person's personal liberty can be taken away. All it takes, he said, is for someone in the government to believe that the activity of an individual is harmful to the sovereignty of the country. The remark was clearly aimed at the working of preventive detention laws and national security cases, where the threshold for state action is low and judicial review is often slow.

Justice Chelameswar urged members of the judicial fraternity to honestly examine the direction in which the constitutional system is moving. To innovate constitutional law, he said, it is important to first understand what is wrong with the current system. In private law, by contrast, history and technology have both played a strong role in driving reform.

He also addressed law students directly. He said that by the time they finish their studies they should be clear about why the legal system exists in the first place. The whole purpose, he said, is to maintain an orderly society and to protect those who cannot protect themselves. Powerful people will always find ways to defend their interests. The justification for studying and improving the law lies in defending the weak.

The chief guest at the event, K. Chandru, a former judge of the Madras High Court, raised a separate concern. He questioned the argument that an Indianised jurisprudence should replace the existing system, which is often criticised as a colonial inheritance. He said that if law is universal and rests on certain principles that cannot be compromised, then knowledge from any part of the world must be welcomed. He also said legal studies must engage with poverty, the caste system and other live social issues that affect the larger population.

For exam aspirants, the conference raises three exam-friendly themes. The first is Part III of the Indian Constitution and the structure of fundamental rights including Articles 14, 19, 21 and 22. The second is the working of preventive detention laws and the Supreme Court's evolving stand on personal liberty, traceable through judgments like Maneka Gandhi v. Union of India and ADM Jabalpur. The third is the wider debate on reforming legal education and the role of law colleges in producing citizens who understand the rights of vulnerable groups.