Mr. President, Sir, l thought that the observations made by my Friend Mr. T. T. Krishnamachari would have been regarded as sufficient to meet the objections raised by my Friend Mr. Santhanam, but since my Friend Mr. Bharathi by his speech has indicated that at any rate his doubts have not been cleared, I find it necessary to rise and to make a few observations. My Friend Mr. Santhanam said that we were unnecessarily borrowing the procedure of an Appropriation Bill and that the existing procedure of an authenticated schedule should have been sufficient for our purposes. His argument if I understood him correctly was this: that an Appropriation Bill is necessary in the House of Commons because the supply estimates are dealt with by a committee of the whole House and not by the House itself. Consequently, the Appropriation Bill is, in his opinion, a necessary concomitant of a procedure of estimates being dealt with by a sort of Committee of the House. Personally, I think there is no connection between the Committee procedure of the House Commons and the necessity an Appropriation Bill. I might tell the House as to how this procedure of the House of Commons going into a Committee of Supply to deal with the estimates came into being. The House will remember that there was a time in English political history when the King and the House of Commons were at loggerheads. There was not such pleasant feeling of trust and confidence which exists now today between the House of Commons and the King. The King was regarded as a tyrant, as an oppressor, as a person interested in levying taxes and spending them in the way in which he wanted. It was also regarded that the Speaker of the House of Commons instead of being a person chosen by the House of Commons enjoying the confidence of the House of Commons was regarded as a spy of the King. Consequently, the members of the House of Commons always feared that if the whole House discussed the estimates the Speaker who had a right to preside when the House as a whole met in session would in all probability, to secure the favour of the King, report the names of the members of the House to the King who criticised the King’s conduct, his wastefulness, his acts of tyranny. In order therefore to get rid of the Speaker who was, as I said in the beginning, regarded as a spy of the King carrying tales of what happened in the House of Commons to the King, they devised this procedure of going into a committee; because when the House met in Committee the Speaker had no right to preside. That was the main object why the House of Commons met in the Committee of Supply. As I said, even if the House did not meet in Committee of Supply, it would have been necessary for the House to pass an Appropriation Bill. As my friend–at least the lawyer friends-will remember, there was a time when the House of Commons merely passed resolutions in committee of Ways and Means to determine the taxes that may be levied, and consequently the taxes were levied for a long time–I think up to 1913– on the basis of mere resolutions passed by the House of Commons Committee of Ways and Means. In 1913 this question was taken to a Court of law whether taxes could be levied merely on the basis of resolutions passed by the House of Commons in the Committee of Ways and Means, and the High Court declared that the House of Commons had no right to levy taxes on the basis of mere resolutions. Parliament must pass a law in order to enable Parliament to levy taxes. Consequently, the British Parliament passed what is called a Provincial Collection of Taxes Act. I have no doubt about it that if the expenditure was voted in Committee of Supply and the resolutions of the House of Commons were to be treated as final authority, they would have also been condemned by Courts of law, because it is an established proposition that what operates is law and not resolution. Therefore, my first submission is this: that the point made by my Friend Mr. Santhanam, that the Appropriation Bill procedure is somehow an integral part of the Committee procedure of the House of Commons has no foundation whatsoever. I have already submitted why the procedure of an authenticated schedule by the Governor-General is both uncalled for, having regard to the altered provision of the President who has no function in his discretion or in his individual judgment, and how in matters of finance the authority of Parliament should be supreme, and not the authority of the executive as represented by the President. I therefore need say nothing more on this point.
