rivers. What is the position of the rivers there? Could not attention be paid to cleaning the silted rivers and canals? Today the position in East Bengal is very distressing and I am very much alarmed.
.... And, after all, can it be denied that we have received considerable foreign aid from various sources, and that we are receiving that foreign aid and can it be denied that hardly a small percentage of it has been spent on East Pakistan.
If it is a case of foreign aid, surely both the wings have a right to take the benefit of it. Then, Sir, there is another matter over which the people of East Bengal feel and that is the question of defence and of bases. Sir, I would not go into the question of strategy: that is a matter that the army should look after. But I will maintain that the people in East Bengal can be trained to be a fine military force as they were in the old days. It was the Bengal regiment that created a reputation for itself long before the other regiment. possibly about the same time as the Madras Regiment, created a name for itself. Now here something could be done; some attention could be paid to the military training and whether you produce soldiers or not, whether East Bengal can be defended or not against aggression in East Bengal, whether West Pakistan can be defended only in West Pakistan, these are matters into which I will not enter but this much I am certain that every patriotic citizen desires that he should be associated with the defense of his country.
... After all East Bengal is not such a backward area as to have justified all this under-development, that you say, that people are not coming forward and there is nothing there as if the people are primitive or something to that effect. There is absolutely so justification for this view.
... Now, let us come to the provisions of this Constitution. Is it really honestly and improvement on the 1935 Act? I can hardly see that it is so in any respect. The lists are there as they were before; powers are there, just as they were before. You have merely called if Federal Constitution, whereas it was not federal previously. But same lists existed; there had been some modification but the same List I. List II and List III are there. In the days when India was a unitary Government you still had the same Lists I, II and III and so what is the difference that you can show from the Government of India Act. You can say that the residuary powers have been given to the Provinces under this constitution. But what are residuary powers? Do they ever come in for exercise?. Where, Sir, You have differed from the 1935 Act, it has always been done to the detriment of democracy and against the interests of this country. May I just point out a few instances and then ask you whether you should not make some efforts to bring it into line with progressive thought?
Take the case of the powers of the President.......... You have given to the President the powers of the British sovereign as they stand of late. The British sovereign has supreme powers, but there is, in Britain a Convention, Convention which no sovereign may dare to break, it is an unwritten convention and the powers of the sovereign are unwritten. No sooner you put that down in your book, no sooner you put that down in the Constitution, no sooner that that becomes justiciable, that convention will be thrown
