I do not blame Dr. Ambedkar or the Drafting Committee. We are all labouring in these matters under two handicaps. One of them is that many of the provisions come here as a result of prolonged discussion and negotiation between various schools of thought and various shades of opinion. It is often said that the thing is an integrated whole and we have to take it as a whole or reject it as a whole. We have to pay this price for agreement and concoct. I do not therefore grudge it. But the other difficulty is greater. On occasions like this sympathies of most of us go out to the high principles which in the past we proclaimed from housetops. But there are other friends who occupy seats of authority and responsibility throughout the country. They warn us that the aftermath of war and partition has unchained forces which if allowed to gain upper-hand will engulf the country in anarchy and ruin. They therefore advocate that Parliament must be able to pass laws arming the Executive with adequate powers to check these forces of violence, anarchy and disorder. They are great patriots and our trusted leaders. Many of us are not convinced that dire results would necessarily follow the adoption of the phrase “due process of law”. But the difficulty is this, that even if we were to stand for our own convictions there is no scope far experimenting in such matters. There is a saying in Marathi that whether a thing is a poison or not cannot be tested by swallowing it; because if it is a poison the man dies. So in such matters there is no scope for experiment and we have therefore to heed to the warnings given by our leaders.
