PEOPLE IN . . . . . . . . . RIGHTS 379
I should have thought that legal ingenuity ought to be able to find some way of imposing some restrictions or some limitations upon the power of the Minister to act upon such reports so that there is enough ground for taking executive action and that there is sound semblance of genuineness in the report submitted. If that is done, I think, then the Supreme Court is there as another safeguard.
India is now in a transitional stage. When the U. S. A. framed its Constitution and incorporated the fundamental rights therein, its people did not know what the nature, scope and limitations of those rights were. It was only after a long course of judicial decisions of the Supreme Court that the difficulties were settled, and the nature, scope and limitations of fundamental rights were all laid down. Similarly, I am sure that after a period of five or ten years, people in India would know their fundamental rights and what their Constitution meant for them.
Adult Franchise
Question : Why was adult franchise introduced in India all of a sudden and not gradually ?
Answer: I think the party in power was so much committed to the principle of adult suffrage that notwithstanding the fact that towards the end they began to feel somewhat doubtful about its utility, they could not go back to it.
Personally, I am not at all afraid of adult franchise. I am one of the few people who are very much in touch with the masses and I feel certain that there is no fear of adult suffrage being misunderstood or misrepresented in any way. The only difficulty I feel about adult suffrage is the capacity of the attenuated official machinery to carry out the entire polling of this vast mass of voters in the country. The only way by which that difficulty could be solved, in my judgement, is not to have election in all the constituencies in one day, but to spread them over a few days to enable the machinery to function efficiently.
Question : Is it a fact that in the meeting of Hyderabad Scheduled Castes Federation Working Committee it was decided to give an ultimatum to Caste Hindus that if they did not