I have listened to what my friend Seth Damodar Swarup has just said. Here in this House he says that there should be no hurry in considering the Draft Constitution; while outside the House I have heard these very friends say “The work of framing the Constitution is taking a considerable amount of time. God knows when it will be finalised and elections will be held under the new Constitution”. It is necessary and in fact people are anxious that we should finalise the Constitution quickly and hold fresh elections on the basis of adult suffrage, in which every person of the age of twenty one years may exercise his vote and elect his real representative in order that the administration may be under the control of the real representatives of the people, and the administration may justly bear the name of a Popular Government. The present Constituent Assembly has been formed by means of indirect election. People holding views like my friend Seth Damodar Swarup even go to the length of saying that the present Constituent Assembly is a useless body and that it should be dissolved and the Draft Constitution prepared by it should be placed before a fresh Assembly elected on the basis of adult franchise. Seth Damodar Swarup and people of his way of thinking say all these things and at the same time they demand here more and more time for considering this Draft Constitution. The present suggestion, or I should say the motion before the House, may perhaps require modification here and there, but the motion as a whole is a welcome one and I endorse whole-heartedly the object behind it. It confers power on the President to disallow amendments which seek to make merely verbal or grammatical changes–such as comma, semi-colon and such other things. The Drafting Committee itself may effect such changes. The Consultative Committee which sits every day or the other bodies that are there can effect such changes. I said in the very beginning that English is not our language but we have drafted the Constitution in that language. I am afraid we cannot easily detect any grammatical mistakes that might have been committed. It is unnecessary for me to remark that we are not well conversant with its phraseology and other niceties of idioms. A man from England may go on amending this draft throughout his life. We would like this Constitution in English to be repealed and substituted by a constitution written in our own language. It is for this reason that we are unable to make it as perfect as we would like. In so far as the question of improvement of the language of the Draft is concerned there is one difficulty. Pandit Nehru, Dr. Ambedkar and Shri K. M. Munshi are all brilliant masters of English language. But the style of each is marked with his individuality. It is evident that none of us is in a position to judge which of these brilliant styles is correct from the point of view of the English usage, and which words and idioms are appropriate and which are not. I believe the purpose and the meaning in view would be substantially conveyed whatever style we may agree to employ for our purposes. I therefore, submit that amendments aiming to improve the language of the Draft are entirely useless, and we should not waste our time in considering such amendments.
