Mr. President, I submit, Sir, that there is a slight ambiguity in this Clause 17, which I would request Sir, Gopalaswami to clear in the course of his reply. In this clause we are treating the President and the Federal Parliament as two distinct entities, whereas in Clause 13 we have defined the Federal Parliament as the President plus the two Houses, that is, the Council of States and the House of the People. Personally I feel now, Sir, that the deletion of the words “National Assembly comprising” in Clause 13 was unfortunate because if we had retained them we could have defined the Houses jointly as a National Assembly and the Parliament would have been the President plus the National Assembly. Otherwise confusion is bound to arise throughout this Constitution as between the Federal Parliament, the President and the two Houses taken together.
