We thus find that the feeling among Congressmen in general, as evidenced by this circular of the Constituent Assembly section of the Congress Party, is for extended fundamental and civic rights which will enable the country to function in a free manner and for political oppositions to grow. What is the necessity of fundamental rights in a bourgeois national democracy which you are trying to have? There one of the fundamental objects is that a political opposition must have full freedom to express its views, to draw its own conclusions and to say anything it likes. If I am in the opposition or if someone else is in the opposition it is certainly his business to say that the existing Government is despicable; otherwise he would not be in the opposition. Why should my right to say that be curtailed and at the same time we should assume that political opposition will grow and democracy will develop? It cannot; it will have to depend on the sweet will and the tender mercies of the party in power or the executive in power. That is not the basis of democracy.
