Sir, I beg wholeheartedly to support the amendment proposed by Professor Shah where he says that the member States of the Union of India shall be organised on a uniform basis of groups of village panchayats co-operatively organised. I would like to go a step further and say that instead of making the village panchayat a unit, we should make a village Soviet as the unit of our Constitution. It will not be out of place to point out to you that I approached Mahatma Gandhi and presented to him the Soviet Constitution and discussed with him all the points contained in that Constitution. He agreed and at least accepted two principles of that Soviet Constitution. One of those two principles was, “No work, no vote”. The second thing was that our unit must be a village Soviet and he said that the Constitution of the Soviet was quite similar to the Constitution of the All-India Congress Committee here, as we have got village Congress Committees which elect representatives to the Tehsil Congress Committees; the Tehsil Congress Committees elect their representatives to the District Congress Committees, the District Congress Committees to the Provincial Congress Committees and the Provincial Congress Committees to the All-India Congress Committee. The same process has been adopted by the Soviet Constitution. Every village there is a self-sufficient Village Soviet. It sends its representatives to the higher Soviets. If we give up this idea of the village panchayats and accept the village Soviet as our unit, all these absurdities which exist in the Constitution by way of provision for minorities, etc. will disappear. With this suggestion, I wholeheartedly approve and support the amendment proposed by Professor Shah.
