Page 165 - Seekers Guide Book
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The Seeker’s Guide
had been lengthened unnecessarily by hundreds of
amendments, the result of which was that in the present
day no longer any sanctity is attached to the Constitution
of India. In my younger days, people were very fearful
of lawlessness. First of all, it was Gandhi who broke the
law by Namak Satyagraha. He forgot that he was not
breaking the law of salt, but the sanctity of law itself. For
this reason, in Britain there is no written constitution
rather laws are made only based on tradition. Similarly
in the US extremely few amendments are made. The
reason for this is that both the British and the American
know that the Constitution signifies a sanctified code of
law. If you separate sanctity from law, law is reduced to
being nothing.
In India, each time there is a new government, a new bill
that is passed. Palkhivala had written that the British had
ruled India for two hundred years and made only 500 acts,
while our governments in fifty years after Independence
had made 5,000 bills! Hence no one knows how many
acts and bills there are.
The Quran was given the status of a religious sanctity
and its text was preserved for all eternity; had this not
been the case, people would have changed the very text
of the Quran.
If certain situations arise then an ‘executive order’ can
be issued by the head of state and whatever changes are
required should be implemented as executive order of the
ruler, while the text of the Quran should not be altered.
For instance, Umar ibn al-Khattab during his time
as caliph had issued an executive order of validating
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