Shikhar Nidhi, Law College Dehradun
Introduction
“I am quite prepared to say that I shall be the first person to burn it (Constitution of India) out. I do not want it” B.R. Ambedkar had said.1 Only after three years of adoption of the Indian Constitution, did Ambedkar publicly disown it in parliament. This suggest that even the pioneer of the Indian Constitution was not satisfied with how it turned out to be.
Constitutional endurance refers to how long a constitution will remain in effect between the time it is adopted and the time it is replaced by a new constitution. Thomas Jefferson while advocating that the dead do have not right to rule over the living and set out to calculate the exact time when it would be best to replace the current constitution with a new one, and he discovered that the constitution should be replaced every 19 years so that each generation can set its own fundamental rules.2 The same was reaffirmed in a landmark study "Comparative Constitutional Law." by Tom Ginsburg, James Melton & Zachary Elkins. In their data, the life expectancy of a national constitution is 19 years. 3
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