of duties, not just in terms of which institution ought to be in charge of implementation, but whether duties ought to be implemented and enforced at all. Many of these confusions continue today. For instance, in the 2001 case of AIIMS Student Union v. AIIMS and Ors., the court held that the fundamental duties, though unenforceable by law, were as important as fundamental rights given the shared prefix of “fundamental” before both the rights and the duties.98 Further, the court held: State is all the citizens placed together and hence though Article 51A does not expressly cast any fundamental duty on the State, the fact remains that the duty of every citizen of India is the collective duty of the State.99 In this case, then, the court read the fundamental duties, to not just being obligations placed on citizens but also being a collective duty placed on the State as a collective body of citizens. Further, since both fundamental rights and fundamental duties in the Constitution are ‘fundamental’, this is the basis of the correlation between the rights and the duties. Such an understanding, however, is neither consistent with the prevailing body of case law, which rarely attempts to locate the underlying principles or the historical trajectory of duties, and nor does it locate itself within a specific conception of the nature of duties. By excavating these historical debates, we better understand the sources of these confusions. As a next step, we will, in a subsequent article, discuss the adoption of fundamental duties in the Constitution of India through the 42nd Amendment. 98 99 AIIMS Student Union v.AIIMS and Ors. (2002) 1 SCC 428. Paragraph 58, AIIMS Student Union v.AIIMS and Ors. (2002) 1 SCC 428. 38 Journal of the National Human Rights Commission, Vol. 22, 2023