Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday said the legislature, judiciary and executive were three wings of the same family that should work to strengthen each other while remembering their Constitutional limits, PTI reported.
“They are members of the same family...We do not have to prove anyone right or wrong,” the prime minister said at an event to mark Constitution Day. “We know our strengths, we know our weaknesses.”
Modi added that the balance between the executive, legislature and judiciary was the backbone of the Constitution. He also pitched for self-regulation and a system of checks and balances to ensure that the institutions functioned well.
Quoting BR Ambedkar, Modi said there should be a limit for any authority. “The legislature may be free to frame any law, the executive may be free to make any decision, and the Supreme Court may be free to give any interpretation of the law,” he said. “But the need of hour is that we strengthen one another...One branch understands the needs of the other.”
Earlier on Sunday, Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra and Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad had also spoken about their branches.
Prasad had said that governance “must remain” with those elected to govern, and that Public Interest Litigations should not be used as “a substitute for governance and the law-making powers of the executive and the legislature”.
The chief justice, however, refuted the claim that the judiciary was encroaching on the domain of the legislature and the executive. “The Supreme Court of India believes we are only under Constitutional sovereignty, and we shall practise it,” he said. “One single religion that everyone must follow is the Constitutional religion.”
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