942 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
Government ? I make this suggestion because I feel that the States might raise an objection that this is a concurrent piece of legislation and being a concurrent piece of legislation the States have the right ordinarily to administer these Acts. I do not think that this is a concurrent piece of legislation in which the States can claim to have a right to administer.
I claim that this is a Central law although it does not fall in List I of the Seventh Schedule. The provisions contained in article 35 are quite clear. It has been stated in article 35 that any law to be made for inflicting punishment for any infringement of a law made in pursuance of article 17 shall be by Parliament and not by the State. Those are the very express words. Therefore there can be no doubt in my mind that this law will have to be by virtue of the Constitution administered by the Centre and not by the States. I say this because my hon. friend might be saying that since we have made the offences under this Act cognisable, it does not matter if the law is administered by the States but that argument cannot stand at all in virtue of article 35 and I would suggest to him that he should introduce an express provision in the Bill that the Law shall be administered by the Centre. If my friend’s contention or the contention of the States is that this is also a concurrent piece of legislation, I would like to draw his attention to the proviso to article 73 which is a very important one and which relates to the administration of laws in the concurrent field. My hon. friend will remember that in the scheme of things in the Government of India Act of 1935 we had the same kind of classification of subjects— List I—Central subject, List II—State subject, and List III— Concurrent subject, but the Government of India Act contained an express provision that the power of the Centre to make law in the concurrent field was confined merely to lawmaking. It could not encroach upon the field of administration. The reasons why such a provision was made in the Government of India Act, 1935, are quite irrelevant to the times in which we find ourselves now, but when we made the Constitution we refused to accept such a provision. We said that although generally the Centre may leave a law in this concurrent field