Mr. President, it is at the end of nearly three years that we are coming to the end of our deliberations. Before I go on to discuss some of the aspects of the present Constitution, I would like to survey very briefly in the process through which we have already gone. When we first commenced our task, we were only a Constitution-making body and India has then undivided and was a whole. When we first met here, there was a section of the Members elected to this House who were not co-operating with us. At that time, just on the fifth day of our meeting for the first time, the Objectives Resolution which has been rightly described as India’s Charter of Freedom was moved. That Resolution was moved on the 13th December, 1946 and was unanimously passed on the 22nd January, 1947. I would like to draw the attention of the House to three things that that Resolution contained. It first laid down that India shall be an Independent, Sovereign Republic. Secondly, that India was to be constituted into a Union or Federation and that the Federation was to consist of territories with their present boundaries or with such others as may be determined by the Constituent Assembly, and they were to be more or less autonomous units with residuary powers, and those units were to exercise all powers and functions of government and administration, save and except those that are assigned or going to be assigned to the Union. That Sir, clearly shows that what we then intended was clearly a sort of federation of so many territories or parts of territories of India which were going to be constituted into autonomous or semi-autonomous units. After the passing of the Resolution, several committees were formed and one of the most important committees was the Union Powers Committee which published its report on the 4th July 1947. That report was ready in May 1947. In that report, Sir, you will find that the very first clause of it says that the federation shall be one independent republic known as India. That means that the idea still was the same, that India shall be a federation of these units. As I have said already, at that time, the unanimous opinion was that what we wanted to frame was a complete unadulterated federation of several States. But several events happened in the meantime. Power came to be transferred to the people of India on the 15th August, 1947. And at the same time India also came to be divided. This was after we had started our work and passed that Resolution, called the Charter of Indian Freedom. Then, Sir, as we all know, partition was followed by many tragic events and a heavy responsibility was thrown, not only on our leaders, but also on the Constituent Assembly which began to function both as a constitution-making body and also as the Central Parliament under the Indian Independence Act. If these events had not happened probably we would have stuck to our original plan of having a scientific, systematic, complete federation of Units. But these events were combined with the task of framing the Constitution and this largely affected our outlook, which was till then consistent, and also affected many of the aspects of our task. The suddenness of the intervening events blurred, to some extent, our vision. A strong Central Government suddenly became a matter of urgent necessity. I yield to none, including the last speaker in saying that a centrally strong Government certainly is a necessity. But what that means has to be seen. In view of the problem of the States which were left in an unnatural state by the departing British authorities, our task was still further complicated. And the creation of Pakistan itself created many difficulties. The Frankenstein of Pakistan which arose out of the very body of India, tore it into three pieces, and it was responsible for the spilling of innocent blood, unparalleled in human history and this made us shudder at the very thought that the rest of India should even consist of even any parts. That changed our outlook with respect to the problem with which we were faced. If we look at what we had been thinking all the time, we would see that we were first consistent in trying to frame a federal Constitution, in the true sense of the term. But these intervening events, the tragedy of partition and the events that followed, led us into altering our first Charter of Freedom and diverting ourselves from the goal which we had set before ourselves. And the whole things has been due to the fact that we became obsessed with the idea of having a Centre which was going to be strong. In that connection, I would like here to say that everybody wants that in the context of world events as they are now, we do want a strong government in this country. But what is the meaning of a government being “strong”? power was transferred on the 15th August 1947 to the people who differed among themselves in many respects. At least till the 15th August we thought that the suitable form of administration could only be a federal one, consisting of suitable units formed and caved out of these vast masses of people. But as I said, the events that had happened had brought about a change in our outlook. How are we to construct this new strong structure? We have to form the people into separate homogenous strong units. Or is it possible to suddenly change the central administration in the form in which such a central Government could be imposed by a foreign Government like the British Government? We have to build up these units, and in the building of a strong Centre we must so build the units so that they may themselves be strong. Unless the units are strong, the Federation can never be strong. But it appears that what happened as I said, rather affected the course of events. I find at the time of the first reading, or rather at the stage when the reports of the various committees were considered, the substance of federation was still there. But at the time of the second reading, we developed a fear complex, if I may say so, May be that it was justified by events that happened in our own country and also by events outside. But the fact has to be noted that it did affect the course of events. Adult franchise was differently looked upon, on account of the illiteracy of the people. But this illiteracy is already known to all. It is also known that this illiteracy cannot be removed within a short time, though we may want to. Therefore adult franchise came to be looked upon not only with grave suspicion, but as a matter of grave danger. The result was that the autonomy of the States, or their semi-autonomy came to be looked upon as a matter of national danger. We kept the form of the federation, but changed the substance or contents of that federation. It was with the idea of having a federation that we began changing the names of the provinces into States. If the present idea had existed throughout we never would have made that change. But while the name of “State” is there, the power of the State is so curtailed that it is a misnomer to call it a “State” any longer. It would have been much better to have a unitary type of Government, if we so wanted. Then the whole structure would have been differently built.
