Vol. 1 · pages 421–425

406 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES Clause 4 provides that once a State is admitted into the Union, its integrity shall be maintained and it shall not be liable to sub-division except in accordance with the provisions contained in the clause. ARTICLE I—Section II Clauses 1 and 2 Clause 1 permits the United States of India to incorporate States which are independent but which are on the border and which desire to join the Union. Clause 2 enables the United States of India to acquire territory and to incorporate it or to treat it as separate territory. ARTICLE II—Section I The inclusion of Fundamental Rights in the Constitution requires no justification. The necessity of Fundamental Rights is recognized in all Constitutions old and new. The Fundamental Rights included in the Article are borrowed from the Constitutions of various countries particularly from those wherein the conditions are more or less analogous to those existing in India. ARTICLE II—Section II Clause 1 Rights are real only if they are accompanied by remedies. It is no use giving rights if the aggrieved person has no legal remedy to which he can resort when his rights are invaded. Consequently when the Constitution guarantees rights it also becomes necessary to make provision to prevent the Legislature and the Executive from overriding them. This function has been usually assigned to the judiciary and the Courts have been made the special guardians of the rights guaranteed by the Constitution. The clause does no more than this. The clause proposes to give protection to the citizen against Executive tyranny by investing the Judiciary with certain powers of inquisition against the abuse of authority by the Executive. This power takes the form of issue of writs. The High Courts in India possess these powers under the Government of India and under their letters patent. These powers are however subject to two limitations. In the first place the powers given by the Letters Patent are available only to the High Courts in the Presidency Towns and not to all. Secondly these powers are subject to laws made by the Indian Legislature. Thirdly the powers given by the Government of India Act, 1935 are restricted and may prove insufficient for the protection of the aggrieved person. The clause achieves two objectives : (1) to give the fullest power to the Judiciary to issue what under the English Law are called Prerogative Writs and (2) to prevent the Legislature from curtailing these powers in any manner whatsoever. Clause 2 It is difficult to expect that in a country like India where most persons are communally minded those in authority will give equal treatment to those

STATES AND MINORITIES 407 who do not belong to their community. Unequal treatment has been the inescapable fate of the Untouchables in India. The following extract from the Proceedings of the Board of Revenue of the Government of Madras No. 723 dated 5th November, 1892. illustrates the sort of unequal treatment which is meted out to the Scheduled Castes by Hindu Officers. Says the report : “134. There are forms of oppression only hitherto hinted at which must be at least cursorily mentioned. To punish disobedience of Pariahs, their masters— ( a) bring false cases in the village Court or in the criminal Courts; ( b) obtain, on application, from Government, waste lands lying all round the paracheri, so as to impound the Pariahs’ cattle or obstruct the way to their temple; ( c) have mirasi names fraudulently entered in the Government account against the paracheri; ( d) pull down the huts and destroy the growth in the backyards; ( e) deny occupancy right in immemorial sub-tenancies; ( f) forcibly cut the Pariahs’ crops, and on being resisted charge them with theft and rioting; ( g) under misrepresentations, get them to execute documents by which they are afterwards ruined; ( h) cut off the flow of water from their fields; ( i) without legal notice, have the property of sub-tenants attached for the landlords’ arrears of revenue.” “135. It will be said there are civil and criminal Courts for the redress of any of these injuries. There are the Courts indeed; but India does not breed village Hampdens. One must have courage to go to the Courts; money to employ legal knowledge, and meet legal expenses; and means to live during the case and the appeals. Further most cases depend upon the decision of the first Court; and these Courts are presided over by officials who are sometimes corrupt and who generally for other reasons, sympathize with the wealthy and landed classes to which they belong.”. “136. The influence of these classes with the official world can hardly be exaggerated. It is extreme with natives and great even with Europeans. Every office, from the highest to the lowest, is stocked with their representatives, and there is no proposal affecting their interests but they can bring a score of influence to bear upon it in its course from inception to execution.” The Punjab Land Alienation Act is another illustration of unequal treatment of the Untouchables by the Legislature. Many other minority communities may be suffering from similar treatment at the hands of the majority community. It is therefore necessary to have

408 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES such a provision to ensure that all citizens shall have equal benefit of Laws, Rules and Regulations. The provisions of Clause 2 are borrowed from Civil Rights Protection Act, 1866, and of March 1st, 1875 passed by the Congress of the United States of America to protect the Negroes against unequal treatment. Clause 3 Discrimination is another menace which must be guarded against if the Fundamental Rights are to be real rights. In a country like India where it is possible for discrimination to be practised on a vast scale and in a relentless manner Fundamental Rights can have no meaning. The Remedy follows the lines adopted in the Bill which was recently introduced in the Congress of the U.S.A. the aim of which is to prevent discrimination being practised against the Negroes. Clause 4 The main purpose behind the clause is to put an obligation on the State to plan the economic life of the people on lines which would lead to highest point of productivity without closing every avenue to private enterprise, and also provide for the equitable distribution of wealth. The plan set out in the clause proposes State ownership in agriculture with a collectivised method of cultivation and a modified form of State Socialism in the field of industry. It places squarely on the shoulders of the State the obligation to supply capital necessary for agriculture as well as for industry. Without the supply of capital by the State neither land nor industry can be made to yield better results. It also proposes to nationalize insurance with a double objective. Nationalized Insurance gives the individual greater security than a private Insurance Firm does inasmuch as it pledges the resources of the State as a security for the ultimate payment of his insurance money. It also gives the State the resources necessary for financing its economic planning in the absence of which it would have to resort to borrowing from the money market at a high rate of interest. State Socialism is essential for the rapid industrialization of India. Private enterprize cannot do it and if it did it would produce those inequalities of wealth which private capitalism has produced in Europe and which should be a warning to Indians. Consolidation of Holdings and Tenancy Legislation are worse than useless. They cannot bring about prosperity in agriculture. Neither Consolidation nor Tenancy Legislation can be of any help to the 60 millions of Untouchables who are just landless labourers. Neither Consolidation nor Tenancy Legislation can solve their problem. Only collective farms on the lines set out in the proposal can help them. There is no expropriation of the interests concerned. Consequently there ought to be no objection to the proposal on that account. The plan has two special features. One is that it proposes State Socialism in important fields of economic life. The second special feature of the

STATES AND MINORITIES 409 plan is that it does not leave the establishment of State Socialism to the will of the Legislature. It establishes State Socialism by the Law of the Constitution and thus makes it unalterable by any act of the Legislature and the Executive. Students of Constitutional Law will at once raise a protest. They are sure to ask : Does not the proposal go beyond the scope of the usual type of Fundamental Rights ? My answer is that it does not. If it appears to go beyond it is only because the conception of Fundamental Rights on which such criticism is based is a narrow conception. One may go further and say that even from the narrow conception of the scope of the Constitutional Law as comprising no more than Fundamental Rights the proposal can find ample justification. For what is the purpose of prescribing by law the shape and form of the economic structure of society ? The purpose is to protect the liberty of the individual from invasion by other individuals which is the object of enacting Fundamental Rights. The connection between individual liberty and the shape and form of the economic structure of society may not be apparent to everyone. None the less the connection between the two is real. It will be apparent if the following considerations are borne in mind. Political Democracy rests on four premises which may be set out in the following terms : (i) The individual is an end in himself. (ii) That the individual has certain inalienable rights which must be guaranteed to him by the Constitution. (iii) That the individual shall not be required to relinquish any of his constitutional rights as a condition precedent to the receipt of a privilege. (iv) That the State shall not delegate powers to private persons to govern others. Anyone who studies the working of the system of social economy based on private enterprise and pursuit of personal gain will realize how it undermines, if it does not actually violate, the last two premises on which Democracy rests. How many have to relinquish their constitutional rights in order to gain their living ? How many have to subject themselves to be governed by private employers? Ask those who are unemployed whether what are called Fundamental Rights are of any value to them. If a person who is unemployed is offered a choice between a job of some sort, with some sort of wages, with no fixed hours of labour and with an interdict on joining a union and the exercise of his right to freedom of speech, association, religion, etc., can there be any doubt as to what his choice will be. How can it be otherwise ? The fear of starvation, the fear of losing a house, the fear of losing savings if any, the fear of being compelled to take children away from school, the fear

410 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES of having to be a burden on public charity, the fear of having to be burned or buried at public cost are factors too strong to permit a man to stand out for his Fundamental Rights. The unemployed are thus compelled to relinquish their Fundamental Rights for the sake of securing the privilege to work and to subsist. What about those who are employed? Constitutional Lawyers assume that the enactment of Fundamental Rights is enough to safeguard their liberty and that nothing more is called for. They argue that where the State refrains from intervention in private affairs—economic and social—the residue is liberty. What is necessary is to make the residue as large as possible and State intervention as small as possible. It is true that where the State refrains from intervention what remains is liberty. But this does not dispose of the matter. One more question remains to be answered. To whom and for whom is this liberty ? Obviously this liberty is liberty to the landlords to increase rents, for capitalists to increase hours of work and reduce rate of wages. This must be so. It cannot be otherwise. For in an economic system employing armies of workers, producing goods en masse at regular intervals some one must make rules so that workers will work and the wheels of industry run on. If the State does not do it the private employer will. Life otherwise will become impossible. In other words what is called liberty from the control of the State is another name for the dictatorship of the private employer. How to prevent such a thing happening ? How to protect the unemployed as well as the employed from being cheated out of their Fundamental Rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness ? The useful remedy adopted by Democratic countries is to limit the power of Government to impose arbitrary restraints in political domain and to invoke the ordinary power of the Legislature to restrain the more powerful individual from imposing arbitrary restraints on the less powerful in the economic field. The inadequacy may the futility of the plan has been well-established. The successful invocation by the less powerful of the authority of the Legislature is a doubtful proposition. Having regard to the fact that even under adult suffrage all Legislatures and Governments are controlled by the more powerful an appeal to the Legislature to intervene is a very precarious safeguard against the invasion of the liberty of the less powerful. The plan follows quite a different method. It seeks to limit not only the power of Government to impose arbitrary restraints but also of the more powerful individuals or to be more precise to eliminate the possibility of the more powerful having the power to impose arbitrary restraints on the less powerful by withdrawing from the control he has over the economic life of people. There cannot be slightest doubt that of the two remedies against the invasion by the more powerful of the rights and liberties of the less powerful the one contained in the proposal is undoubtedly the more effective. Considered