I will make it quite clear. You will know it when you listen to my Speech. Sir, coming to the third para of the original Resolution, I understand that you desire the unity of India. It is out of that desire you have given this right of autonomy and residuary power in paragraph three but refused right of session to linguistic, etc., units. I am also as much eager for the unity of India as you are, but the point is: can you get that unity by means of force or by compulsion? I come from Bengal. Look at Bengal. In Bengal the overwhelming majority of the population who are peasants and amongst whom the overwhelming majority is Muslim, are ground down under the double slavery of British Imperialism and the Hindu Upper Class. Now, Sir, in the image of freedom that the Bengal peasants and the Bengali Muslim has before his mind’s eye, if he wants that neither British Imperialists nor Hindu Upper Class can exploit him, if he wants that his land–the Bengali speaking territory–should be free and sovereign, free from the control of any other part of India–can you deny that right of freedom to him? You cannot. And if the Muslim League–the reactionary section of the leadership of the Muslim League–are able to distort this freedom urge of the Bengali Muslim into religious separatism, or into demanding the Assamese speaking territory, I should say the responsibility for this is on the Congress leadership. Why? Because the Congress has never unequivocally recognised this right of separation of the nationalities on national-linguistic basis and whatever recognition there was in the ruling of the Congress President that no territorial unit of India will be compelled against its wish to come into the Indian Union, You have given the final good-bye to that in this Resolution. You have said here that no unit however strong its wish might be to go out of India, can go out. The utmost it can hope for is residuary powers and autonomy. Well, Sir, this is not the way by which you would hope to win over the Muslim population of Bengal. This is not the way you would hope to win over the other nationalities which will come into the forefront as time goes by. So you cannot achieve the unity of India by forcing a unitary constitution on them and if you look at the constitutions of recent days in the world you will find as in Yugoslavia, in Czechoslovakia, etc. that the recognise the rights of self-determination including that of separation. For instance, in Yugoslavia the very first article of their new Constitution gives the right of self-determination and separation to the Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Montenegrins, etc., to the full. That is why today in Europe you find that though Yugoslavia is a small, country, yet it is the most united and advancing most rapidly.
