DRAFT CONSTITUTION 1201
DRAFT CONSTITUTION— (contd.)
- Mr. Frank Anthony (C. P. & Berar : General) : Mr. President, sir, first of all I wish to thank you for the unfailingly courteous and gracious manner in which you have invariably presided over the deliberations of this House. Deserving tribute has already been paid to the Drafting Committee for the way in which it has performed its arduous and responsible duties. I would like very briefly to pay a particular tribute to my honourable Friend, who is sitting on my right, Dr. Ambedkar. I do not believe that any one of us can really gauge the volume of work and the intensity of concentration that must have been involved in the production of this voluminous and by no means easy document. And while, on occasions, I may not have agreed with him, it always gave me the very greatest pleasure to listen to his tremendous grasp not only of fundamentals but of details, of the clarity with which he invariably presented his case. It has been said that this Constitution has received a mixed reception. It is inevitable that its reception should have been mixed because, inevitably, it is a mixed Constitution. It is composite in character. I believe that it is a blend and a proper blend between idealism on the one side and realism on the other. I know that some of my ardently idealistic friends have criticised it. They would like to have seen instead of this blend something in the nature of a decalogue or the Ten Commandments, something which was so wholly idealistic that it would have wilted and died under the first impact of administrative realities and political difficulties.
As I have said, I believe that we have borrowed enough from idealism to make the Constitution a fairly attractive and an aspiring document and on the other hand we have not based it entirely on material, from mundane considerations so as to retard or in any way to take away from this the inspiring elements. I realize, Sir, that it is not a perfect document, but at the same time I feel that in hammering it out, we have traversed all the processes of the democratic manufactory, that we have ranged through the whole gamut of democratic factors; there has been careful thought; there has been close analysis; there has been argument and counter-argument; there has been fierce controversy and at one time I thought that the controversy was so fierce that we might reach the stage of what the Romans called Argumentum ad baculum that is, settling it by actual physical force. But in the final analysis has pervaded a real sense of accommodating and a real feeling of forbearance....
*CAD, Official Report, Vol. X, 25th November 1949, pp. 938-939.