DRAFT CONSTITUTION 511
is really the summon bonum of each of these longish paragraphs. I have gone through them and I find that Prof. K. T. Shah wants to propose four things. One is that he does not want the Prime Minister, at any rate by statute. Secondly, he wants that every Minister on his appointment as Minister should come forward and seek a vote of confidence of the Legislature. His third proposition is that a person who is appointed as a Minister, if he does not happen to be an elected Member of the House at the time of his appointment, must seek election and be a Member within six months. His fourth proposition is that no person who has been convicted of bribery and corruption and so on and so forth shall be appointed as a Minister.
Now, Sir, I shall take each of these propositions separately. First, with regard to the Prime Minister, I have not been able to understand why, for instance. Prof. K. T. Shah thinks that the Prime Minister ought to be eliminated. If I understood him correctly, he thought that he had no objection if by convention a Prime Minister was retained as part of the executive. Well, if that is so, if Prof. K. T. Shah has no objection for convention to create a Prime Minister, I should have thought there was hardly any objection to giving statutory recognition to the position of the Prime Minister.
In England, too, as most students of constitutional law will remember, the Prime Minister was an office which was recognised only by convention. It is only in the latter stages when the Act to regulate the salaries of the Ministers of Cabinet was enacted. I believe in 1939 or so, that a statutory recognition was given to the position of the Prime Minister. Nonetheless, the Prime Minister existed.
I want to tell my friend Prof. K. T. Shah that his amendment would be absolutely fatal to the other principle which we want to enact, namely collective responsibility. All Members of the House are very keen that the Cabinet should work on the basis of collective responsibility and all agree that that is a very sound principle. But I do not know how many Members of the House realise what exactly is the machinery by which collective responsibility is enforced. Obviously, there cannot be a statutory remedy. Supposing a Minister differed from other Members of the Cabinet and gave expression to his views which were opposed to the views of the Cabinet, it would be hardly possible for the law to come in and to prosecute him for having committed a breach