Enemies within the system

The framers of the Constitution of India opted for the British parliamentary system, as a matter of course, at the very outset of their deliberations, at a joint meeting on June 5, 1947, of the Union Constitution Committee and the Initial Constitution Committee. Ivor Jennings, one of the foremost authorities on the British Constitution, pointed out in his classic Cabinet Government : “Experience has taught the British people that ‘fair play’ is as necessary in public as in private life. It may indeed be least possible where the arts of parliamentary persuasion and the dexterities of partymanagement are brought to their highest perfections … Let the political parties be reduced to two, but let the chasm dividing them be so profound that a change of administration would in fact be a revolution disguised under a constitutional procedure.” To his niece, Blanche Dugdale, he was more forthright in a conversation on April 25, 1925: “I doubt if you would find it written in any book on the British Constitution that the whole essence of British parliamentary government lies in the intention to make the thing work. The Joint Committee on Indian Constitutional Reform took a dim view of India’s ability to work “an unqualified system of parliamentary government”. It said: “Parliamentary government, as it is understood in the United Kingdom, works by the interaction of four essential factors: the principle of majority rule; the willingness of the minority for the time being to accept the decisions of the majority; the existence of great political parties divided by broad issues of policy, rather than by sectional interests; and finally the existence of a mobile body of public opinion, owing no permanent allegiance to any party and therefore able, by its instinctive reaction against extravagant movements on one side or the other, to keep the vessel on an even keel.