I was saying that this Constitution is a Federal Constitution with a facade of Parliamentary democracy. Mahatma Gandhi wanted India to be a decentralised democracy. He told Louis Fischer, the eminent American publicist some years ago that “there are seven hundred thousand villages in India each of which would be organised according to the will of the citizens, all of them voting. Then there would be seven hundred thousand votes and not four hundred million votes. Each village in other words, would have one vote. The villages would elect the district administration; the district administrations would elect the provincial administration and these in turn would elect the President who is the head of the executive. Louis Fischer. to whom he propounded this plan, interjected”: ‘That is very much like the Soviet system’. And Gandhiji replied: ‘ I did not know that. I do not mind.’
