Critics advising India should know what the country had been: AG Venkataramani

It is cultural unity something more fundamental and enduring that any other bond which may unite the people of a country together-which has welded this country into a nation. He said the countrys legacy had shown that its people were ultimately governed by dharma, which is a higher constitution.

Attorney General R Venkataramani on Thursday said critics offering advice about ''what the country ought'' to be have to first sift through the multiple perspectives, and find what the ''country had been.'' He was speaking at the launch of the book ''Integration of Bharat, Political and Constitutional Perspective'' written by Yashraj Singh Bundela. ''Today, the life of the nation is seen from various angles and perspectives. Critics, from various angles, try to give you the nation's version of what India ought to be and when you want to say something about what India ought to be, you have to go back from the point of what India has been. So unless you know what India has been you cannot say what India ought to be,'' he said.

Rejecting the schools of thought which ignored the country's past, Venkataramani said India needed people who could find what the country ''truly had been''.

Congratulating the author for not providing a textbook perspective and instead focusing on the political and constitutional perspectives, he said ''Constitution and politics are the new blend'' and one could not exist without the other.

''In one sense, India doesn't require any story about integration, because the story of the life of India is all about integration. We have understood it as one place where minds are united in common pursuits. The stages of a country belong to different understandings of life,'' he said.

Former Supreme Court judge and Chairperson of the National Green Tribunal Adarsh Kumar Goel, who delivered his speech in Hindi, said two other books based on a similar theme are Deendayal Upadhyaya's ''Ekatma Manavvad'' (Integral Humanism) and R K Mookerji's ''Fundamental Unity of India''. Citing a Supreme Court judgment of 1984 by Justice P N Bhagwati, he said, ''It is an interesting fact of history that India was forged into a nation neither on account of a common language nor on account of the continued existence of a single political regime over its territories but on account of a common culture evolved over the centuries. It is cultural unity something more fundamental and enduring that any other bond which may unite the people of a country together-which has welded this country into a nation.'' He said the country's legacy had shown that its people were ''ultimately governed by dharma, which is a higher constitution''. This was reflected in the Supreme Court's Sanskrit inscription below its emblem, which said 'Yato Dharmastato Jayah' (Where there is justice or dharma, there is victory).

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