Sir, I am glad to find myself in Delhi today. The old saying was that Delhi is at a great distance. I never felt the truth of it until this occasion. Previously I found Delhi so very near but on this occasion I find it has been very far and I am glad I am able to find myself here today, and I am glad that I am here today on a historic occasion. Cold as the winds that blow in December in Simla, and hard as flint like the rocks over which aeroplanes fly over the Baluchistan hills towards the west, must be the heart of the Indian who is not thrilled today at this sight of this Assembly, the Assembly which I feel certain will go down in history down the corridors of time. My feeling is that though we may come from different provinces and different States we are not here on behalf of any particular part of India; we are members of all India and that is quite clear. It is in that spirit that I feel certain that we shall all do our work here, not on behalf of any parochial interests, not on behalf of any narrow sectarian interests but on behalf of the broad interests of the one nation of India. I do not propose to refer to any local problems here; our local problems ought to be solved locally. This place is for all-India problems, and I do hope that all of us will so put our heads together and so do our work that our children and our grand-children and generations yet unborn, will say, “Our fathers and our grand-fathers sat in the year 1947 at Delhi and framed a constitution which has stood the test of time”, and on which history will say, “Blessed are these men; they did their work and they laid the foundations rightly, and on those foundations will the future history of India evolve”. It is not for us here to take any narrow views; we will take large views, and let us so conduct ourselves that in the future history of India they will say that we did our work properly and that we acquitted ourselves like men, like true sons of India and not true sons of any particular part of India.
