There is another point raised by my Hon’ble friend, Dr. Kunzru, namely that several of these things are not justiciable. I am not a lawyer, and, therefore, I do not wish to go into the technical side of it. All that I say is to express my extreme satisfaction with regard to clause 22(1) and 22(2) wherein the right is given to the ordinary citizen to move the Supreme Court by appropriate proceedings for the enforcement of any of the rights guaranteed by this part. This is a very important privilege that is being conferred on our citizens. The only additional privilege that I wanted to be conferred upon them is that–as I said on an earlier occasion–those citizens who are so poor as not to be able to move the Supreme Court, should be enabled under proper safeguards, of course at the cost of the State, to move the Supreme Court in regard to the exercise of any of these fundamental rights. With all these provisos Dr. Kunzru told us that the very essence of these fundamental rights is being lost and Mr. Lahiri has agreed with him. It is rather amusing how Liberalism and Communism can come together and coincide with each other. We have our experience of the way in which the Public Safety Ordinances were enforced in this country. We know that those Ordinances were very arbitrary; they conferred terrible powers, unquestionable powers upon the executive. Are we to be told now that in the same way we should not have any of these provisos at all but that simply power should be conferred upon the Government and that any order made under this particular clause or that particular clause cannot be questioned in a court of law? That is how it is. We were detained and the orders that were passed to detain us could not be questioned at all in any court of law. But in spite of that there were noble judges. Hon’ble judges of the Calcutta High Court and also of the Central Provinces, who had the courage of their conviction, who were able to look in between the words of those very same ordinances as well as the Public Safety Act and were able to save many people from the gallows by setting aside the judgments of the so-called Special Courts. Similarly, it must be possible and it would be possible, when this document becomes a part of our own Constitutional Law. This document has been so carefully drafted as not to give arbitrary powers but to give just as much power as can possibly be digested in the organisational or institutional exercise of his rights by the ordinary citizen in this country, either organisedly or individually–as much power as possible to those people to see that these individuals, these organisations or institutions are given every possible safeguard or protection. Therefore, these provisos are not going to make these rights nugatory at all. These provisos are intended to prevent our democracy being demoralised or degraded into a dictatorship. These rights are intended to protect our citizens, our law-abiding citizens who believe in democracy from those who believe in dictatorship but only pretend to work for the cause of democracy in order to establish their own dictatorship.
