Mr. President, my friend Seth DamodarSwarup has submitted a motion before the House today that we should postpone the consideration of the Draft Constitution placed before us. In support of his motion he has advanced some arguments. Before taking up an analysis of those arguments I would like to draw the attention of the Assembly to one or two important matters. The first thing that strikes me is that the motion moved by my friend is absolutely undesirable. After all, for what purpose have we assembled here? We have assembled here having been elected to frame the Constitution. The political party, to which the Honourable Member belongs, once decided that this Constituent Assembly is not an independent sovereign body, and so it should be boycotted. Again that party, under what considerations I know not, decided that they should seek election to it. They were elected to this Assembly but some of their party-men did not attend the Assembly in the beginning. But later, again under a consideration, of which I am not aware, they decided to participate in this Assembly. Now you can imagine what opinion can be formed of a group, party or an individual whose policy changes every moment, which is satisfied at one moment and discontented the next. I think the idea that we should not frame the Constitution in this House struck the mind of my friend Seth DamodarSwarup rather too late. In my humble opinion, the arguments advanced by him are weak, groundless, uninteresting and senseless to such a degree as cannot be defined. His first argument is that the Constituent Assembly does not have a representative character. I would like to submit that there is ridiculous aspect of democracy, and that comes to the surface when to make democracy fully representative in character, we evolve such institutions as proportional representation and thereby establish fascism amongst ourselves. In Germany, Italyand France, wherever attempts were made to establish this type of Democracy, the only result was that it was soon transformed into fascism. The argument, that we are the representatives of 15 per cent of the population and that the representatives of 85 per cent of the population are not with us and therefore we should postpone on that ground the consideration of the Constitution, is a fallacious one – fallacious because nowhere in the world can a model assembly be constituted. We have represented the whole of the country in this Assembly. Sethji had been a member of the Congress till recently; on the basis of the formation of such associations, could he say that the Congress was a body representing the whole of India? While he could not say that on numerical basis, my friend Sethji has always considered himself to be a divine lieutenant in India. Even though not even one poor man, not even a farmer, and a worker has elected him to represent India, yet he considers himself to be a representative. And why does he do so? As the saying goes in the Russian language “we are the will of the peoples”. We are the representatives of the will, emotions and ambitions of the people, and in this capacity representing the whole of India we are framing our Constitution, though our representation is not based on numbers. Hence, I think that it is not proper to raise this fallacious argument about percentages.
