Nature of The Assembly
The Constituent Assembly, consisting of indirectly elected representatives, was set up for the purpose of drafting a constitution for India (including what are now the separate countries of Pakistan and Bangladesh). In the event, it remained in being for almost three years, acting as the first parliament of India after independence in 1947. The Assembly was not elected on the basis of universal adult franchise; plus only Muslims and Sikhs were given special representation as "minorities". The influential Muslim League initially boycotted the Assembly after having failed to prevent its gathering. The Constituent Assembly was a one-party body in a one-party country. The Congress Party had wide diversity within itself, from conservative industrialists to radical Marxists, but party members mainly drove the process.
The Assembly met for the first time in New Delhi on 9 December 1946. The last session of the Assembly was held on January 24, 1950. Over the course of this period (two years, eleven months and seventeen days), the Assembly held eleven sessions, sitting on a total of 165 days. The hope behind the Assembly was expressed by Jawaharlal Nehru: "The first task of this Assembly is to free India through a new constitution, to feed the starving people, and to cloth the naked masses, and to give every Indian the fullest opportunity to develop himself according to his capacity."
Read more about this topic: Constituent Assembly Of India
Famous quotes containing the words nature of the, nature of, nature and/or assembly:
“Consider first the nature of the business in hand; then examine thy own nature, whether thou hast strength to undertake it.”
—Epictetus (c. 50–120)
“A mob is a society of bodies voluntarily bereaving themselves of reason, and traversing its work. The mob is man voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I grow savager and savager every day, as if fed on raw meat, and my tameness is only the repose of untamableness. I dream of looking abroad summer and winter, with free gaze, from some mountain-side,... to be nature looking into nature with such easy sympathy as the blue-eyed grass in the meadow looks in the face of the sky. From some such recess I would put forth sublime thoughts daily, as the plant puts forth leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A man may be a heretic in the truth; and if he believe things only because his pastor says so, or the assembly so determines, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy.”
—John Milton (1608–1674)