DRAFT CONSTITUTION 571
Members” the first thing he will realise is that merely because a candidate has been elected to Parliament, does not entitle him to become a member of Parliament. There are certain, what I may call, ceremonies that have to be gone through before a duly elected candidate can be said to have become a Member of Parliament. One such thing which he has to undergo is the taking of the oath. He must first take the oath before he can take his seat in the House. Unless and until he takes the oath he is not a member and so long as he is not a member he is not entitled to take a seat in the House. That is the provision. Unless candidates take their oath and take their seats they do not become members and they do not become entitled to elect the Speaker. That is the sequence of events,— election, taking of the oath, becoming a member and then becoming entitled to the election of the Speaker. Therefore the election of the Speaker must be preceded by the taking of the oath.
Having regard to this sequence of events it would be impossible to say that the oath shall be taken before the Speaker, because the Speaker is not there and the Speaker cannot be elected until the elected candidates become members. Therefore the authority to administer the oath must necessarily be vested in some person other than the Speaker. That being the position the question is, in whom this power to administer the oath shall be vested. Obviously, it can be vested only in the President or in some other person to whom the President may transfer his authority in this behalf. In accordance with this sequence of events the only course to adopt is to vest the authority to administer the oath either in the President or in some other person appointed in that behalf by him. It cannot be done by vesting the authority in the Speaker, because the Speaker does not exist at all then.
Now I come to the point raised by our President. What happens to a newly elected member in a bye-election with regard to the taking of the oath ? Has he to go to the President or can he take the oath before the Speaker ? The answer to that question is that the President will, after the Speaker has been elected, confer upon him by order the authority to administer the oath on his behalf, so that when a newly elected candidate appears in Parliament for the purpose of taking the oath, it will be administerd to him by the Speaker as the person authorised by the President. Consequently, in the case of a newly elected person, it would not be necessary for him to go before the President or some other presiding authority appointed by the President.