PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES 81
Shri Tyagi: When people are not quick to understand, I take time to make them understand.
Pandit Kunzru (Uttar Pradesh) : Do Government insist that the Bill should be passed today?
Dr. Ambedkar: I am not saying so. It is only the Hon. Deputy Speaker who says, “let us sit for half an hour.”
Pandit Kunzru: I think it will be a fruitless discussion and I venture to think that the discussion will end quicker if we adjourn till tomorrow.
* Dr. Ambedkar: On the first point raised by my friend, Mr. Tyagi, as to whether there is at all any necessity for bringing in this measure, I think what has fallen from the Prime Minister should suffice, and I would only like to add this by way of clarification : Our real difficulty has arisen by reason of the fact that the definition Article, Article 366, does not define the word “Minister”. Therefore the word “Minister” is left to be interpreted in two ways, either in the larger sense which would include not only Members who are Ministers but also Members who are Deputy Ministers or Ministers of State. It would also include in the popular sense Parliamentary Secretaries and also Parliamentary Under-Secretaries. That is one interpretation which is perfectly possible, but it is also possible to put a narrow construction whereby Ministers would mean not Ministers including Deputy Ministers, Ministers of State, Parliamentary Secretaries or Parliamentary Under Secretaries, but only Members of the Cabinet. As the House knows that there is customarily—I am deliberately using the word ‘customarily’—quite a distinction between Ministers who are Members of the Cabinet and Ministers who are not Members of the Cabinet, and it is quite possible for anybody, even for a Court, to put the narrower construction and confine the de jure interpretation of the word “Ministers” to Members of the Cabinet only, in which case undoubtedly.......
*P. D., Vol. 2, Part II, 10th March 1950, pp. 1344-48.