Chief Justice of India JS Khehar on Tuesday said every citizen of the country should be proud of being an Indian irrespective of their religion, reported PTI. Khehar was addressing the Supreme Court Bar Association on the occasion of India’s 70th Independence Day.

“Whether it is Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Zoroastrians, Muslims or Jains, everybody should be proud of his own religion to be an Indian,” he said. “Everybody should be proud of his own ethnicity. Proud of being an Indian and that is what the Constitution is all about.”

He said all citizens were equal. They were “neither inferior nor superior to anyone”. “You are no less or more than anyone else,” he said. “We have an agriculturalist as our vice president who started his political career by pasting party posters. We have a prime minister who used to be a tea vendor at one point.”

Khehar informed the association that he was born in Kenya. “The chief justice of India was not a citizen of this country to start with, but when he became the citizen of this country, he was equal to everybody else and had equal opportunities,” he said. “This is what citizenship or independence is. The freedom to all to achieve their hopes, ambitions, desires.”

-s�M