In our passion for making the Centre strong, we are misinterpreting it as the strength of the executive. If we want a strong executive, let us also have a strong legislature and a strong judiciary. I have pleaded that it is not the executive alone that makes the State. We have the Parliament and the Judiciary which, together with the executive, make the State. All my pleadings have fallen on deaf ears. I sometimes tell myself, “O Judgment, thou art fled to brutish beasts, And Men have lost their reason“. Have we come to that stage ? I hope not. I hope, for the good of India, for the good of our fellow men and women who have just emerged from the darkness of slavery into the light of freedom, we shall do something for their happiness and not merely be content with strengthening the hands of a group of people, a tiny coterie or caucus in power. That is not the idea which the Father of the Nation had in mind. As the House well knows he was all for decentraliasation, and not for strengthening the Centre at all. He was for a decentralised State and for giving power to self-sufficient units.
