z:\ ambedkar\vol 08\vol8 04.indd MK SJ+DK 1 10 2013/YS 13 11 2013 291
PAKISTAN : NATIONAL FRUSTRATION 291
conditions exist that Parliamentary Government can take roots. One such condition was pointed out by the late Lord Balfour when in 1925 he had an occasion to discuss the political future of the Arab peoples in conversation with his niece Blanche Dugdale.
In the course of this conversation he said* :—
“It is partly the fault of the British nation—and of the Americans; we can’t exonerate them from blame either—that this idea of ‘representative government’ has got into the heads of nations who haven’t the smallest notion of what its basis must be. It’s difficult to explain, and the AngloSaxon races are bad at exposition. Moreover we know it so well ourselves that it does not strike us as necessary to explain it. I doubt if you would find it written in any book on the British Constitution that the whole essence of British Parliamentary Government lies in the intention to make the thing work. We take that for granted. We have spent hundreds of years in elaborating a system that rests on that alone. It is so deep in us that we have lost sight of it. But it is not so obvious to others. These peoples — Indians, Egyptians, and so on — study our learning. They read our history, our philosophy, and politics. They learn about our parliamentary methods of obstruction, but nobody explains to them that when it comes to the point, all our parliamentary parties are determined that the machinery shan’t stop. ‘The king’s government must go on’ as the Duke of Wellington said. But their idea is that the function of opposition is to stop the machine. Nothing easier, of course, but hopeless.”
Asked why the opposition in England does not go to the length of stopping the machine, he said:—
“Our whole political machinery presupposes a people. .... fundamentally at one.”
Laski has well summarized these observations of Balfour on the condition necessary for the successful working of Parliamentary Government when he says† :
“The strength of Parliamentary Government is exactly measured by the unity of political parties upon its fundamental objects.”
Having stated the condition necessary for the successful working of the machinery of representative government it will be well to examine whether these conditions are present in India.
How far can we say that there is an intention in the Hindus and the Muslims to make representative government work ? To
- Dugdale’s Balfour (Hutchinson), Vol. II, pp. 363-64.
† Parliamentary Government in England, p. 37.