DRAFT CONSTITUTION 1171
Third Reading is going on which will also conclude in three or four days. After that the inauguration of this Constitution will be held over till the historic day of the 26th January. All this is good and for that the Honourable Dr. Ambedkar and his other colleagues of the Drafting Committee deserve the congratulations of the whole House, because they have drafted this Constitution with great skill and labour....
*Shri T. Prakasam (Madras : General): ...The Constitution is a great document and the friends who have been in charge of this framing of this—Dr. Ambedkar—is a great lawyer, is a very able man. He has shown by the work he has done here, how he would be competent to be a king’s Counsel of Great Britain, to be perhaps competent to sit on the Woolsack only; but this is not a Constitution that we, the people of this country wanted. Mahatma Gandhi when he took up the organization of this country in the name or the Congress at once saw how this country could be helped and how the millions could be helped. Therefore he decided that the whole country should be divided on linguistic basis so that the people of each area would be competent to develop themeslves....
† Prof. Shibban Lal Saksena : ...My criticism of the Constitution does not mean that I am blind to the achievements which we have made during these three years. I consider, this framing of the Constitution has by itself been the greatest single achievement of ours during the last three years. The barriers to the dawn of freedom which the British Government had erected by the artificial creation of the problem of minorities, the problem of Princes in the Indian States and the Heaven-born Civil Service, have all been wiped of as if by magic in the short space of the last 2 years. The delay in the framing of the Constitution has enabled us to incorporate in this Constitution similar provisions for the administration of the 566 Indian States which have now been transformed and integrated into nine provinces and put on a par with the other units of the Union. This single achievement will be regarded as the greatest task ever accomplished in any country....
‡ The Honourable Rev. J. J. M. Nichols Roy (Assam : General) : Mr. President, Sir, I am very glad to come here to give my hearty support to the motion moved by Dr. Ambedkar that the Constitution as settled by
*CAD, Official Report, Vol. X, 19th November 1949, p. 697.
† Ibid., p. 707.
‡ Ibid., p. 708.