Today after India has attained freedom it is not necessary for me to tell you that the world is looking up to India. It expects something new from India. At such a times as the present one it was necessary that we should have placed before the world a Draft Constitution, a Constitution, which could have been taken as an ideal. Instead we have copied the constitutions of other countries and incorporated some of their parts and in this way prepared a Constitution. As I have said, from the structure of the Constitution it appears that it stands on its head and not on its legs. Thousands and lakhs of villages of India neither had any hand nor any voice in its framing. I have no hesitation in saying that if lakhs of villages of India had been given their share on the basis of adult franchise in drafting this Constitution its shape would have been altogether different. What a havoc is poverty causing in our country! What hunger and nakedness are they not suffering from! Was it not then necessary that the right to work and right to employment were included in the Fundamental Rights declared by this Constitution and the people of this land were freed from the worry about their daily food and clothing? Every man shall have a right to receive education; all these things should have been included in the Fundamental Rights. But, Sir, I need not say anything else except point out that even Honourable Dr. Ambedkar has had to realize and has also admitted in his speech that many objections have been raised in regard to the Fundamental Rights. Not withstanding the reasoning of the learned Doctor, I find it difficult to accept that the Fundamental Rights and other rights are one and the same thing. I understand that Fundamental Rights are those rights which cannot be abrogated by anybody – nay, not even by the government. One can be deprived of these rights only as a punishment for an offence, awarded by a Court of Law. But if the Fundamental Rights were to be at the mercy of the government, they cease to be Fundamental Rights. Sir, what I mean by all this is that if the thousands of villages of the country, the poor classes and the labourers of India had any hand in framing this Constitution, it would have been quite different from what it is today.
