[HN Gopher] All 104 amendments to the Constitution of India as G...
___________________________________________________________________
All 104 amendments to the Constitution of India as Git commits
Author : mishraprince
Score : 179 points
Date : 2021-01-24 16:17 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| peter_d_sherman wrote:
| https://github.com/prince-mishra/the-constitution-of-india/b...
|
| >"338B. (1) There shall be a Commission for the socially and
| educationally backward classes to be known as the National
| Commission for Backward Classes."
|
| [...]
|
| "(5) It shall be the duty of the Commission--
|
| (a) to investigate and monitor all matters relating to the
| safeguards provided for the socially and educationally backward
| classes under this Constitution or under any other law for the
| time being in force or under any order of the Government and to
| evaluate the working of such safeguards;
|
| (b) to inquire into specific complaints with respect to the
| deprivation of rights and safeguards of the socially and
| educationally backward classes;
|
| (c) to participate and advise on the socio-economic development
| of the socially and educationally backward classes and to
| evaluate the progress of their development under the Union and
| any State;
|
| (d) to present to the President, annually and at such other times
| as the Commission may deem fit, reports upon the working of those
| safeguards;
|
| (e) to make in such reports the recommendations as to the
| measures that should be taken by the Union or any State for the
| effective implementation of those safeguards and other measures
| for the protection, welfare and socio-economic development of the
| socially and educationally backward classes; and
|
| (f) to discharge such other functions in relation to the
| protection, welfare and development and advancement of the
| socially and educationally backward classes as the President may,
| subject to the provisions of any law made by Parliament, by rule
| specify.
|
| [...]
|
| "(9) The Union and every State Government shall consult the
| Commission on all major policy matters affecting the socially and
| educationally backward classes."
|
| [...]
|
| "340. Appointment of a Commission to investigate the conditions
| of backward classes.--(1) The President may by order appoint a
| Commission consisting of such persons as he thinks fit to
| investigate the conditions of socially and educationally backward
| classes within the territory of India and the difficulties under
| which they labour and to make recommendations as to the steps
| that should be taken by the Union or any State to remove such
| difficulties and to improve their condition and as to the grants
| that should be made for the purpose by the Union or any State and
| the conditions subject to which such grants should be made, and
| the order appointing such Commission shall define the procedure
| to be followed by the Commission."
|
| [...]
|
| 342A. (1) The President may with respect to any State or Union
| territory, and where it is a State, after consultation with the
| Governor thereof, by public notification, specify the socially
| and educationally backward classes which shall for the purposes
| of this Constitution be deemed to be socially and educationally
| backward classes in relation to that State or Union territory, as
| the case may be.
|
| (2) Parliament may by law include in or exclude from the Central
| List of socially and educationally backward classes specified in
| a notification issued under clause (1) any socially and
| educationally backward class, but save as aforesaid a
| notification issued under the said clause shall not be varied by
| any subsequent notification"
|
| ===
|
| PDS: I sure as hell hope that we Americans will never be
| considered a "socially and educationally backward class" by
| India! <g>
|
| And I sure as hell hope that the citizens of other countries --
| will never be considered a "socially and educationally backward
| class" -- by India as well! <g>
|
| I mean, take India's historical relationship with Pakistan, for
| example...
|
| My question to the Writers of The Indian Constitution:
|
| _Are the citizens of Pakistan -- also a "socially and
| educationally backward class" ?_
|
| ?
|
| Because, I sure as hell hope not! <g>
|
| By the way, here's a quick quote from (our American) Declaration
| Of Independence:
|
| "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that
|
| _all men are created equal_
|
| , that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable
| Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of
| Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are
| instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent
| of the governed..."
|
| Also, from our American Constitution (The "Equal Protection
| Clause"):
|
| "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the
| privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor
| shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property,
| without due process of law;
|
| _nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal
| protection of the laws_. "
|
| See, our laws here in the U.S. are much simpler -- basically
| _everybody is equal_ before the eyes of the Law...
| mishraprince wrote:
| - Constitution of India applies only in the Union of India
|
| - The first article of the constitution defines the boundaries
| of the Union of India: https://github.com/prince-mishra/the-
| constitution-of-india/b...
|
| - The terminology referred to as "socially and educationally
| backward classes" is to provide certain underprivileged
| sections of the society better living standards
|
| - PART-3 (https://github.com/prince-mishra/the-constitution-of-
| india/b...) guarantees the Fundamental Right to Equality _14.
| Equality before law.--The State shall not deny to any person
| equality before the law or the equal protection of the laws
| within the territory of India._
| vletal wrote:
| This is how we should maintain and pass laws. To see which
| legislator proposed / amended which paragraph etc.
|
| Might be interesting to see the authors of the tax law etc.
| walshemj wrote:
| This data must exist as this is how parliamentary systems work
| and (MP's Senators, Congress Persons) should in theory have
| this data.
|
| Might be very good to allow civilians to look at the data but
| it does require that you really understand your particular
| country does things.
|
| Having said that the Executive can "Get away with Naughty Shit"
| and that's a quote from one on the MP's that lost out to John
| Bercow for speaker of the HOC.
| mishraprince wrote:
| Yep, that is the long term agenda of the project. Most (all?)
| amendments have certain socio-economic/political context which
| gets lost over time. Amendments (and laws in-general) are
| better understood when the context is well laid-out.
|
| I'll add all such contexts to all these amendments, including
| who tabled the bill, how did the debates go, were there any
| following judicial reviews: all that data.
| throwaway20-20 wrote:
| This is very cool. Diff for 42nd Ammendment which was used to
| impose emergency https://github.com/prince-mishra/the-
| constitution-of-india/c...
| mishraprince wrote:
| Especially look at the restrictions on courts!
| Noumenon72 wrote:
| I did Ctrl+F for "speech" and "press" and did not find
| anything in https://github.com/prince-mishra/the-
| constitution-of-india/c...
| mishraprince wrote:
| oh, I meant "courts" not press. Let me correct the comment.
|
| I was especially referring to https://github.com/prince-
| mishra/the-constitution-of-india/c...
|
| This amendment to Article 368 essentially gave the
| legislature unrestricted power to amend the constitution
| without fear of a judicial review.
| eevilspock wrote:
| There is no judicial review for amendments to the US
| constitution either. In the US the job of the courts are
| to interpret and apply the constitution. It's not their
| role to write it or constrain the writing of it.
| lazide wrote:
| The Supreme Court can and does severely constrain or
| expand what the writing is interpreted to actually apply
| to - you see this all the time around 1st, 2nd, 5th, 10th
| US amendments. In theory, a whole amendment could be
| neutered or nuked that way.
| wtmt wrote:
| Great effort!
|
| I wish the files were named as Part01.txt, Part02.txt and so on
| to suit the default string sorting used by GitHub. The list on
| GitHub has Part1.txt, Part10.txt...Part19.txt, Part2.txt, and so
| on, which makes it a bit cumbersome to browse on that site.
| mishraprince wrote:
| Yeah, now that you pointed out, it does look ugly. I created an
| issue: https://github.com/prince-mishra/the-constitution-of-
| india/i... to track this one. I anyway plan to rewrite all
| commits with corrected time and author info; will be a good
| time to rename files as well.
| carlsborg wrote:
| I look forward to the day when constitutional amendments are pull
| requests.
| gwright wrote:
| Not just constitutional amendments, legal documents of all
| kinds would benefit from standard formatting and version
| control.
|
| One difficult challenge is that text-line based diffs don't
| work well for free-form text documents. Line length, line
| breaks, paragraph breaks, list formatting, etc. are very ad-hoc
| in most legal documents.
| smlckz wrote:
| If diff is not enough, you have wdiff. :)
| gwright wrote:
| Helpful, but in the real-world legislative systems I've
| interacted with, the patch (the bill text) isn't formatted
| as an algorithmic diff against the base documents
| (statutes, for example). It is a baroque system that
| requires huge amounts of clerical effort to keep aligned
| and which makes understanding all but the simplest changes
| a mind-numbing exercise.
| Udik wrote:
| In Italy (and I guess in many other places) laws are
| effectively _commits_ , not documents/ files. The actual law
| is often implicit in the result of the successive
| modifications each new law applies to the existing ones.
| Which is terrible from a usability perspective- it's like
| working with lists of patches instead of files.
|
| I think software engineers- thanks to much faster iteration
| cycles and having clarity and order as their only concern-
| have developed solutions and practices that absolutely can
| and should be applied also to the management of the law.
| gwright wrote:
| I think you are just describing the difference between a
| bill (what is debated and discussed during the legislative
| process), and the compendium of statutes (or regulations,
| etc.) that is updated via the legislative process.
|
| My understanding is that there are always administrative
| departments responsible for updating and publishing the
| statutes based on the bills that have been passed. This is
| effectively applying a patch approved by the legislative
| process to the repository of statutes.
|
| If you try to dig into a mainstream news story about
| legislative actions to the actual bill text you'll quickly
| find that for all but the simplest actions the bill text is
| useless for understanding the effect of the bill. The
| problem is that you need the surrounding context of the
| statute or regulation that is being amended in order to
| understand. At least for my state and the US federal
| legislative systems, the web based UI for understanding all
| this is abysmal.
|
| The cynic in me thinks that legislators don't even
| understand the true nature of their own legislation. They
| are making voting decisions based on staff summaries,
| verbal discussions, media reports, constituent sentiment
| analysis, etc.
| Udik wrote:
| > that there are always administrative departments
| responsible for updating and publishing the statutes
| based on the bills that have been passed
|
| I don't think that's the case in Italy. A bill often
| takes the takes the form of sequences such as "in the
| bill n. 1234/05 at the subparagraph 2, the word X is
| replaced with the word Y." There isn't, to my knowledge,
| a notion of "document" which the patch is applied to. You
| can, of course, derive the documents from the successive
| patches, and laws on new matters contain an entire
| document as a "first commit". But in software engineering
| it's the documents/ files you care about, patches and
| commits only exist as a support for change management.
| gwright wrote:
| That is interesting. Thanks for elaborating.
| ssivark wrote:
| But they (almost) are! They just have a more involved review
| process, requiring sign offs from many more people (from a
| diverse group of representative stakeholders) given what's at
| stake. A lot of the process/bureaucracy comes from the scale &
| scope of what's being managed.
| mishraprince wrote:
| Absolutely! It would be a dream come true if Indian law-makers
| start doing things in the public, allowing public to
| comment/vet their ideas/thoughts/plans on upcoming
| legislations. I'm not sure if you're aware: currently the
| farmers in India's capital are protesting against the farm acts
| the Govt. introduced. The acts are supposed to do good to the
| farmers, but since they did not involve them, there is a lot of
| misinformation and protest.
| sorokod wrote:
| Is the official version in English? Are there authorised
| translations to other languages spoken in the sub continent?
| smlckz wrote:
| Only ''authoritative'' translation into Hindi but not for any
| other language from English. See 58th amendment of 1987. You
| may find unofficial translations though.
| mishraprince wrote:
| Yes, the original constitution was drafted in English and the
| full official text of the Constitution in English, available
| here: https://www.india.gov.in/my-government/constitution-
| india/co...
|
| However, Amendment 58 (https://github.com/prince-mishra/the-
| constitution-of-india/c...) made sure Hindi translations exist
| Hindi version here: https://www.india.gov.in/hi/my-
| government/constitution-india...
|
| I am not sure about authoritative versions in any other
| language.
| kepler1 wrote:
| When you've got 104 amendments to a constitution that are the
| governing high level principles of a state, you know you've done
| something wrong.
| walshemj wrote:
| Not really constitutions are living documents that have existed
| for a long time -hundreds of years for older countries like th
| US and UK.
|
| Why would you not expect a lot of changes
| kepler1 wrote:
| A constitution is the high level document that your citizens
| agree are the foundational principles governing the state.
| They are a set of general points that nearly everyone can
| understand at that level and agree to.
|
| They are not the minutiae and laws that govern in detail.
|
| 104 is too many principles, or at the wrong level of detail,
| to be at the level of a constitution for people to discuss in
| concept and agree to as general participants in a society.
| walshemj wrote:
| Not all countries are the same as the USA
| jtvjan wrote:
| Disappointed that they weren't backdated.
| mishraprince wrote:
| By backdated, do you mean correct dates for the commits? I'll
| add that in one of the subsequent commits: both corrected dates
| and authors.
| jtvjan wrote:
| Yeah, that, using the --date parameter on git-commit.
| sb057 wrote:
| India's constitution is the largest national constitution in the
| world, and second-largest overall, only behind Alabama's, which
| has a whopping 951 amendments and nearly 400,000 words as of
| January 2021.
| dvdbloc wrote:
| Who would've thought that Alabama would be home to Big Gov.
| ABeeSea wrote:
| It's because it was written to oppress minorities in as many
| ways as possible.
|
| > At the beginning of the 20th century, the President of the
| Alabama Constitutional Convention, John B. Knox,[12] stated
| in his inaugural address that the intention of the convention
| was "to establish white supremacy in this State", "within the
| limits imposed by the Federal Constitution"[7]
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Alabama#Raci.
| ..
| szatkus wrote:
| If it's the case shouldn't it be much simpler today?
| ABeeSea wrote:
| Alabama never updated parts of their constitution to
| remove it as they kept losing federal court cases. It
| just became unenforceable.
|
| For example their constitution still contains language
| for school segregation and removing voting rights for
| interracial marriages.
|
| Even when they did make updates. It was in the form of
| amendments which increase the overall length. Eg, the
| amendment that lets women vote.
| rtx wrote:
| Imagine all those smart people doing something else.
| sandGorgon wrote:
| This is brilliant. Thank you for doing this. Where are you
| sourcing the original text from ?
| mishraprince wrote:
| Till 96th amendment, I used the work done by
| https://github.com/captn3m0/constitution and
| https://github.com/anoopdixith/TheConstitutionOfIndia/
|
| 96 onwards, I downloaded the gazette notifications and applied
| the changes manually. I could not find any automated way.
|
| I'll file an RTI one of these days to the Legal Department to
| source the Constitution as is, after every amendment. Let's see
| where that goes.
| kissgyorgy wrote:
| Here is a repo for Hungarian laws:
| https://github.com/badicsalex/torvenyek
|
| The dates are accurate.
| frob wrote:
| I always love these sort of things. Here's the same for the US
| constitution: https://github.com/JesseKPhillips/USA-Constitution
|
| As a bonus, this one attempted to backdate the commits in a
| cyphered way (git dates are unix timestamps so the author needed
| to get clever to do anything before t=0 in 1970).
| chungy wrote:
| > git dates are unix timestamps so the author needed to get
| clever to do anything before t=0 in 1970
|
| More specifically, git dates are unsigned timestamps with an
| epoch in common with Unix timestamps.
|
| The big difference is that Unix timestamps are signed and have
| no problem whatsoever backdating to 1776.
| rcoveson wrote:
| I wouldn't say "no problem whatsoever." Lots of things encode
| Unix time as a 32 bit signed integer, which can't date back
| further than 1901.
|
| Any fixed-with type is going to have a lower- and upper-
| bound; whether it has a sign or not doesn't change that.
|
| If git was trying to choose a bound for a 32 bit timestamp, I
| think 1970 is a reasonable starting point; doubling your
| future space is more important than covering space in the
| past. If it's 64-bit, though, then it's kind of silly to not
| just envelop the entirety of human history with all the room
| you've got (as a 64 bit signed integer with 0=year 1970
| does).
| mishraprince wrote:
| I did think about having correct dates and authors, but then I
| got lazy and in fact got more focussed on getting all the
| amendments in place. Now that the core work is done, I'll add
| corrected dates (perhaps real date + 100 years), authors and
| committers in one of the later commits. Thanks for reminding!
| ardy42 wrote:
| > I did think about having correct dates and authors, but
| then I got lazy and in fact got more focussed on getting all
| the amendments in place. Now that the core work is done, I'll
| add corrected dates (perhaps real date + 100 years), authors
| and committers in one of the later commits. Thanks for
| reminding!
|
| How would you even do authorship? These amendments are
| basically institutional works, with sometimes convoluted
| histories (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-
| seventh_Amendment_to_th...).
| smlckz wrote:
| It should not be hard to do the same to this one, given that
| the constitution of india came into effect on 26th january
| 1950.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| If I file a PR on it and more than half a billion Indians give it
| a thumbs up, does it get merged? Talk about e-voting!
| manquer wrote:
| Direct democracy has its problems. 50.01% voting can cause
| serious issues. But using tech to improve speed of policy
| should be a thing
| clintonb wrote:
| > But using tech to improve speed of policy should be a thing
|
| I'm going to push back against this. What problem are you
| actually solving that requires technology? Some would argue
| policy making should be purposefully slow and intentional to
| better understand the effects of said policy.
| etaioinshrdlu wrote:
| Is there something like this for the entire US Code? Laws in the
| US are often written to say something like "Amend Section X to
| say Y.", and it's very hard to follow.
| wolrah wrote:
| I have daydreamed about the same many times and considered
| trying to start it myself, but it didn't take too long before
| realizing that the reason I'd want it is the same reason I
| wouldn't stand a chance at building it.
|
| It would certainly be a wonderful resource though. Especially
| if it could be implemented with a "code review" style interface
| for showing the votes on each of the bills representing a
| commit.
| mishraprince wrote:
| There is a repo for the USA-Constitution:
| https://github.com/JesseKPhillips/USA-Constitution
|
| I am not sure if there are any for the states.
| walshemj wrote:
| You then also need to work out the ramifications of the change.
|
| Eg if motion 39 amend section y to x - Therefore 9.3(iii) is
| removed and renumber section 9.3, these are the Consequentials
| and should also be included.
| fareesh wrote:
| I would like to file a pull request, remove socialism and
| reinstate our original freedom of speech. Unrealistic, but one
| can dream.
| rodamaral wrote:
| Socialism cannot be removed by pull requests, only by brute
| force.
| puppable wrote:
| Wowie.
| abahlo wrote:
| Shouldn't it be one commit if they were amended? /s
| mishraprince wrote:
| An amendment in the Indian Constitution is an act/law/bill in
| itself. It does modify the core document (the constitution) but
| it has an independent existence.
|
| In that sense, one could argue that every "amendment" is a
| bugfix, feature-request of sorts.
|
| Debatable both ways.
|
| I personally like the idea of independent commits better as the
| "git browse" UIs handle individual commits better.
| ra7 wrote:
| It's a joke about git commit --amend.
| mishraprince wrote:
| lol, I took it too seriously then. I thought it to be a
| reference towards squashing all amendments into one commit.
| jackfoxy wrote:
| Every general election adds at least a few new amendments to the
| California constitution
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_California#Ame...
|
| I could not easily find the comprehensive list. It has to be well
| over 100. This page, for instance, is only amendments with their
| own Wikipedia page
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Amendments_to_the_Con...
| incanus77 wrote:
| Reminds me of a thing someone put together when I was Mapbox
| where we had each US state, in order, as a commit alongside their
| (IIRC) GeoJSON shape as a way of progressing through the growth
| of the country.
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(page generated 2021-01-24 23:00 UTC)