Mary Fikry
Antoun Milad
The Indian Embassy in Cairo has celebrated the country’s Constitution Day with the staging of a Hindi play on the making of the constitution and a film screening. The celebration was organised by the Maulana Azad Center for Indian Culture (MACIC), the cultural wing of the Indian Embassy, and had India’s Ambassador to Egypt in attendance.
The play titled “Making of the Constitution” was staged in Hindi by Egyptian students who learn the language at the Embassy’s cultural wing. A short film on the Indian constitution was then screened. Speaking at the event, Ambassador Sanjay Bhattacharyya said:
“The constitution is important for us because it’s the supreme law of the country. So it is higher than the parliament, it is higher than the government and higher than the judiciary. But at the same time it is not fixed because circumstances change,” he said.
“At the time of independence it was said that we were undergoing three revolutions; the political revolution…a social revolution…and an economic revolution. All these were dynamic and the constitution was actually trying to respond to all of them,” he added.
Amr Mahmoud al-Shobaki, Head of Arab-European department at Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, Cairo, delivered a key-note address on the occasion.
“When we started as the committee which drafted the Egyptian Constitution (in 2014) we tried to compare with the Indian and French constitutions,” he said. On this day in 1949, the Constituent Assembly of India adopted the Constitution, which went into effect on 26 January 1950.
Watani International
28 November 2016