DRAFT CONSTITUTION 563
there should be dissolution or whether the House aggrees that the affairs should he carried on with some other leader without dissolution. If he finds that the feeling was that there was no other alternative except dissolution, he would, as a Constitutional President, undoubtedly accept the advice of the Prime Minister to dissolve the House. Therefore it seems to me that the insistence upon having a document in writing stating the reasons why the Prime Minister wanted a dissolution of the House seems to be useless and not worth the paper on which it is written. There are other ways for the President to test the feeling of the House and to find out whether the Prime Minister was asking for dissolution of the House for bona fide reasons or for purely party purposes. I think we could trust the President to make a correct decision between the party leaders and the house as a whole. Therefore I do not think that this amendment should be accepted.
Mr. President : I shall now put the amendments to vote one by one.
[All amendments were rejected. Article 69 was added to the Constitution.]
ARTICLE 71
*The Honourable Dr. B. R. Ambedkar : Prof. K. T. Shah simply wants, in the terms in which he has used, stated explicitly; what in my judgment is implicit in the phrase ‘causes of its summons’. I think this phrase is wide enough to include everything that Prof. K. T. Shah wants and if I may say so, this phraseology, namely “shall address and inform Parliament of the causes of its summons” is a phrase which we find used in the British Parliament. If Prof. Shah were to refer to Campion’s book on the rules of the House of Commons, he will find that this phraseology is used there and after a long and great deal of search for a proper phraseology, we are fortunate enough in finding these words in Campion and I think it is a good phrase and ought to be retained since it covers all that Prof. K. T. Shah wants. Prof. K. T. Shah said that there ought to be a provision for the President also to send messages and to otherwise address the House. I thought that there was definite provision in article 70 which we just now passed, which enables the President to address both Houses of Parliament, also to send messages and the messages may be in relation to a particular Bill or may be any other proceedings before Parliament. I do not think that anything more is
- CAD., Vol. VIII 18th May 1949, p. 110