Mr. President, Sir, I have only a few words to say with regard to the views expressed by my friend, Mr. Khaliquzzaman. Mr. Aziz Ahmad Khan’s amendment, as the House has seen, wants the ministry to be elected by proportional representation. The two amendments that have been moved are mutually contradictory. Mr. Ahmed Ibrahim Sahib says that the Ministers shall be responsible to the provincial legislature. That means that the ministry elected on the basis of Proportional representation would be responsible to the legislature, which in other words, means that after a vote of censure that Minister should resign. On the other hand, the amendment moved by Begum Aizaz Rasul wants that the Minister chosen by proportional representation should continue during the life of the Assembly. The intention of the second amendment is that the Minister should be elected by proportional representation and should continue till the end of the life of the Assembly. Now I want the House, Sir, to envisage the implications of this scheme. The system of proportional representation, as everyone knows, is this that instead of having the support of the majority in the House, you must get the first vote of a small group, and nothing fragments the political life of a country as proportional representation in the selection of ministries. I will give a concrete instance. If there is a House of 300 members, the majority party of, say, 151 must support all the ministers in order that they may retain office, but under P. R. if there are seven ministers and you have got a voting strength of 300 anyone who gets the first votes of 35 or 40 members will be entitled to become a minister. Therefore the House will not look at the ministry as a consolidated body of representatives elected on the general principles and policies which the ministry has to carry out, but it will be fragmented into sections, each trying to get as many first votes as possible. I am not saying this as a matter of theory After the Treaty of Versailles at the end of World War I, on account of President Wilson’s partiality for proportional representation, several at the Central European countries introduced proportional re-presentation and lived to be sorry for it. Instead of putting the national good before them, the ministers were more busy securing the first votes of a small group by raising a very narrow isolated cry. Therefore, the net result of proportional representation will be that the ministry instead of being broadbased on general principles, all ministers standing together and having collective responsibility and interested in doing good to the province as a whole, it will consist of representatives of different groups having different ideologies and different policies. This will invariably result–the 35 votes will fluctuate–in a coalition with practically differing policies, and when a coalition comes, we know the result. Perhaps, members know what happened and what is happening in France during the last 25 years. In France, it has been more or less the fashion to have coalition ministries and the result has been that ministries have been falling like castles of cards. During the last eight or ten years there have been more than twenty–two ministries. Some ministries have lasted only for eight or none days. At the time when Hitler entered Austria, there was no ministry in France. When he entered the Rhineland, there was a care-taker ministry in France, and nobody would become the Prime Minister. This is the situation where you get coalition ministries. This is the greatest danger to which democracy is prone this danger of coalition ministries. There is only one way in which democracy can be practiced effectively and that is by having a majority party. If we have majority party, we must have one and that can only be done first by having the group of ministers selected by the majority party, secondly by collective responsibility and lastly by the Control the Prime Minister exercises over that homogenous ministry. As the. House knows, very well Sir, in England the power of the Prime Minister is absolute and that is what has made the British Government so very strong. It is the Prime Minister who decides as to who should be a minister and can dismiss a minister, and can control his party by saving: “I will get the House dissolved and go to the country unless the party supports me“. The machanism of responsible government which we have therefore been following to a large extent in this country is the British model, and a departure of this Kind will weaken the ministry to a large extent and the provincial legislature will be nothing else but a fragmented house while cannot devote itself to the good of the province. Therefore, though the system of proportional representation looks so innocent that some people have got a fascination for it, it has led to the unmaking of democratic institutions in more than one country in the world. This amendment of Mr. Aziz Ahmad Khan is really speaking destructive of democracy. If you have a democratic systems then you must carry it out to this extent that if the House passes a vote of censure against the ministry, the ministry must be prepared to resign. If it continues, the ministry will be naturally unresponsive to the fluctuations of public opinion.
