Political Science · Political Institutions in India
UGC NET January 2017 Political Science
Who said, 'The Constituent Assembly was a one party body in an essentially one party country. The Assembly was the Congress and the Congress was India'?
AMorris Jones
BPaul R Brass
CGranville Austin ✓ Correct
DRichard Sisson
Correct answer: (C) Granville Austin — The remark that the Constituent Assembly was a one party body in a one party country, and that the Assembly was the Congress and the Congress was India, was made…
Explanation
★The remark that the Constituent Assembly was a one party body in a one party country, and that the Assembly was the Congress and the Congress was India, was made by Granville Austin, which is option (3).
★Austin used this striking phrase to capture the overwhelming dominance of the Congress within the Constituent Assembly.
★The Congress held a very large majority of the seats, so its decisions effectively became the decisions of the Assembly.
★Austin's point was that the breadth of the Congress made it less a narrow party and more a national platform at that time.
★The Congress under leaders like Nehru, Patel and Prasad accommodated a wide range of opinions and interests.
★Because of this, the real debates often took place within the Congress before being settled in the Assembly.
★The phrase comes from Austin's classic work, The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation.
★Granville Austin was an American historian who specialised in the making and working of the Indian Constitution.
★He also wrote Working a Democratic Constitution: The Indian Experience, on the Constitution after 1950.
★The option Morris Jones is wrong, since W.H. Morris Jones is associated with other ideas about Indian politics, such as its idioms.
★The option Paul R. Brass is wrong, since he was a scholar of ethnicity, language politics and the Congress, not the source of this phrase.
★The option Richard Sisson is wrong, since his work centred on the Congress party and later political crises.
★Austin's view connects to Rajni Kothari's later idea of the Congress system of one party dominance.
★Both capture the central place of the Congress in the first decades of independent India.
★For NET, attribute the Assembly was the Congress and the Congress was India to Granville Austin in Cornerstone of a Nation.
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