THE REPUBLICto the reaction to ‘Plan Balkan’ and the partition. As long as the Congress
was in power, both at the centre and in the states, there was no need to
utilise this remarkable constitutional device. When this changed after
1967, however, it was used rather excessively.
The only heritage of the freedom movement which was subsequently
enshrined in the constitution is the catalogue of fundamental rights. The
Government of India Act of 1935 made no mention of fundamental
rights because, according to the British tradition, the protection of such
rights is left to the due process of law. The draft constitution of the
Nehru Report of 1928 did contain a catalogue of fundamental rights, as
the secular nationalists held that such rights guarantee a better protection
of minorities than the grant of political privileges which only enhances
sectarianism. In the Karachi Resolution of 1931 the Congress had
extended this catalogue of fundamental rights to include many items of
the social and economic programme of the party. The right to work or
the right to a living wage had thus been included among the fundamental
rights. The Government of India would have had a hard time if it could
have been sued in a court of law to guarantee such rights to every Indian
citizen. Therefore the Constituent Assembly divided the catalogue of
fundamental rights into a list of justiciable rights and a list of non-
justiciable rights (‘Directive Principles of State Policy’). But even the
justiciable fundamental rights were so carefully defined and hedged about
by emergency provisions which permitted their suspension that a
Communist Party member of the Constituent Assembly complained that
this part of the constitution looked as if it had been drafted by a
policeman. He was not too far off the mark with this statement, because
Home Minister Patel—the supreme chief of all policemen—was the main
architect of this constitution. Law Minister Dr Ambedkar, who had been
given this portfolio although he was not a member of the Congress, did
not have the sort of political power that would have enabled him to do
more than act as the chief draftsman and spokesman—a fact which he
himself deplored.
Nehru was drawn into this process of constitution-making only
occasionally, when controversial matters were at stake. The persuasive
rhetoric with which he could reconcile conservative practice with radical
aspirations was in great demand at such times. Thus he made a great
speech in order to assuage leftist disappointment at the paragraph which
guaranteed due compensation for private property when it was acquired by
the state. This paragraph would prevent all measures of working towards a
socialist state, as well as a radical land reform. The right wing of the
Congress insisted on this and Nehru diverted the attention of the left by
assuring it that the Indian Parliament would not tolerate any move by the
courts to set themselves up as supreme umpires whose verdict could not be
superseded by the people. In fact, most land reform acts were later