Sir, it is a fashion of our day to argue that the social and economic changes that are at present required cannot be made unless individual liberty and democracy are first destroyed and an all-powerful State can push its programmes through. This Resolution, if I read it right, is a refutation of that thesis. It envisages far-reaching social changes- social justice in the fullest sense of the term but it works for those social changes through the mechanism of political democracy and individual liberty. To those defeatists who say that this cannot be done, this Resolution says it can be done, and we have the intention and the determination to do it. The central problem of our times is whether the State is to own the people or the people are to own the State. Where the State belongs to the people, the State is a mere instrument subordinate to the people and it serves the people. It only takes away the liberty of the individual to the extent that the people really desire it. Where the State owns the people, the people are mere robots in a big machine- pushed about here and there by the whims of an all-powerful dictator or an all-powerful party. It is because I believe, Sir, that this Resolution points the direction to a constitution where the people will be in power, where the individual will occupy the centre of the stage and the development of the individual personality will be the main aim of our social good, that I support this part of the Resolution, this aspect of it, for I believe that, as the fathers of the United States Constitution put it, every individual Indian has an “inalienable right to Life, Liberty and pursuit of Happiness“. (Cheers.)
