Mr. Vice-President, I would like that at the time of forming these constituencies, particular care should be taken to make them plural constituencies. The right which you have conferred on the minorities can be preserved only if you make the constituencies in such a way that they should be able to represent themselves. It is necessary, because the minorities have not gained full confidence of the majority up till now. There is yet another point. Pandit Bhargava is trying to have the constituencies so shaped that the rural should be amalgamated with the urban constituencies. But the standard of literacy in the rural areas is so low that while competing with the urban areas, they can never succeed. Besides the old dispute between the producers and the consumers still exists. Whatever we produce, we sell them in ‘Mandies’ and when 25,000 votes shall be pitted against us, to my mind, the people of the rural areas shall never be able to send their representatives while contesting with the people of urban areas and the stockists. What will be the result under such circumstances? The result will be that the producers whose standard of literacy is low and who live in far-off small hamlets, would not be able to send their representatives through elections. Another result will be that the ‘Mandies’ would become centre of activites for ever and the village would be cut off from the political current of the country. The twenty or twenty-five thousand voters of mandies will always try to suppress the villagers politically. We in the Punjab feel that so long as there is fundamental difference between the procedures and the consumers, they should have separate constituencies. Therefore, what we want is that the delimiting Committee should not be influenced by Pandit Bhargava’s speech and this difference should be kept intact, namely, the rural constituencies should be kept separate from the urban constituencies.
