By and large, the institutional influence of the colonial period is still entrenched between the available storylines of British India; the avenues of those ventures are yet to be fully unveiled. Several years ago, a Ph.D. student at a Canadian University whom I met at the Asian Studies Annual Conference told me that, with some difficulty, he got hold of an earlier version of this book from one source. He was impressed that it was one of the rare studies of British India’s highest law-making establishment, the forerunner of the modern Indian Parliament. Contrary to the paucity of legislative studies, there are numerous studies of the previous Indian Civil Service, for example: the predecessor of the Indian Administrative Services that still essentially maintained the old British model of a generalist and non-political bureaucracy. One exception was Profess W. H. Morris-Jones’ The Indian Parliament. In the introductory chapter, he acknowledged the legislative experiences that the post-independence Indian national parliament diligently inherited from its earlier predecessors. This book, in its former and in the current new edition, partially fills the knowledge gap about the old Central Legislature and its impact on the gamut of British Indian politics. Also it modestly contributes to the larger, popular and even the controversial variety of writings on the Indian Colonial experiences.
In my post-doctoral academic journey, I veered away from continuing the legislative research. One exception was a study of Pakistan’s parliament under the executive-controlled Ayub regime that was published as “The National Assembly of Pakistan under the 1962 Constitution” in the Pacific Affairs, University of British Columbia, (Winter), 1969–70. The parliaments under the military-supported governments in Pakistan and later in Bangladesh were constrained in the exercise of their power since the executive was not in their direct control except in a few defined areas. In the second half of 1960s, when I was in the middle of studying the Pakistan’s National Assembly, I could not help feeling that the parliament in a way resembled the previous Central Legislature’s tapered path under the Colonial supremacy. However, my enduring research interest in South Asian politics and the continued teaching in comparative political systems kept me up to date about the institutional growth in both developed and developing countries. Whenever I compared my historical study of the old Indian legislature with the modern Indian and other parliaments in South Asia, I could easily reckon the critical differences between ← xix | xx → a sovereign legislature and the quasi-parliaments in the colonial regimes that gradually faded away since the end of the World War II.
Over the decades, I noticed a remarkable shift in the composition and quality of the parliamentary leadership. In India and the neighboring South Asian countries, the old grip of the lawyer-politicians has sharply declined—they have been largely replaced by the businessmen and a sprinkling of other professions. Furthermore, the deliberative excellence has gone downhill in most of those parliaments on account of several perceptible reasons: lack of debating skills, poor understanding of the legislative procedures, irresistible partisanship, peripatetic attendance in the legislative sittings, meager knowledge of technical and fiscal matters, to name a few of those shortcomings. As I recall my readings of the Central Legislature’s old debates, they were typically sharper, well informed and often daring though occasionally rhetoric had the upper hand in their deliberations. The key Indian leaders in the erstwhile Legislative Assembly refused to hunker down under their perimeters. And then, most of the South Asian parliaments, even in the cabinet form of democracies, have waned in their stand against the executive power abuses. Worse still is the growing unpopularity of legislators virtually all over the world. There is a perceptible feeling that the legislators are, largely, more committed to enjoy the privileges of power, and once they are elected, they are isolated and lose contact with their constituents.
In the late 1960s, Dr. (Mrs.) Najma Choudhury, a former student and later a colleague in Political Science at the Dhaka University, Bangladesh was then preparing her thesis proposal for her anticipated Ph.D. studies at the University of London. At that time, she shared her dissertation ideas on the former East Pakistan Legislative Assembly with me. Her work was later published as The Legislative Process in Bangladesh: Politics and Functioning of the East Bengal Legislature 1947–58, Dhaka University Press, 1980. Dr. Nizam Ahmed, another former student from Dhaka University, now a Professor at the Chittagong University, Bangladesh occasionally shared his research when he was working on the Bangladeshi legislature. His, The Parliament of Bangladesh, Ashgate, 2002, is the classic study of that national legislature’s tortuous path over decades. There are possibly other studies on the subject, but those are the works with which I had a wisp of academic involvement.
May be with a little nostalgia, I feel that the elected members of the preceding Central Legislature were typically keener to represent their constituencies. They did their homework earnestly even when their own ability was still marginalized by the foreign predicators. The pre-1947 Indian ← xx | xxi → Legislature, no doubt a Colonial establishment, was, to a varying degree, the “mother-ship” of legislative institutions in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and numerous other British-colonized countries. Unlike the post-independence Indian Parliament’s stable growth, the Bangladeshi and Pakistani parliaments suffered from the imperious charisma of the national leaders, unmitigated partisanship, extra-constitutional interruptions, rhetorical overtone and lack of sound and continuous legislative traditions, skills and leadership.
The new edition of this volume after more than half a century since the dissertation was finished in 1964 and published as a book in 1965 is an intellectual and emotional homecoming for me in more than one way. It brings me back, in some degree, to my old passion for legislative study. Happily, this is an opportunity for a fresh look at my old findings and narrative—I have done this here and in a few subsequent chapters including the refurbished conclusion. In the new preface here, blended with the tone of an epilogue, I have added an overview of the British Indian legislature in comparative perspectives with the post-Colonial parliaments in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. I did not try that in this volume’s earlier version. But this occasion also ushers an undeniable surfeit of personal memories of my university days in England deeply occupied with my study. Almost consistently, there is an individual toll in course of a doctoral research that I personally experienced as a Ph.D. student and also a young man with a wife and a new born child—Lilya, my eldest daughter, was born in England within a little over a year of my studentship there. With my pressure for daily library work, class, writing and meeting deadlines with my supervisor, I had little time for my family. Maliha, my wife carried the brunt of raising a child, shopping, cooking and feeding the family for which I cannot make enough acknowledgments to her. And whatever credit, I earned for this work in the past and whatever appreciation, I might deserve for its new version, I would share it with my wife, no matter if I pay her formal tributes here or elsewhere.
Sometime after my return from England, possibly in 1965, I met poet Benazir Ahmad, an elderly gentleman, in fact my wife’s relative; he was a member of the Pakistan National Assembly at that time. When I told him about my thesis on the British Indian Central Legislature and that I just started working on Pakistan’s National Assembly, he was very happy. When I was complaining about consecutively working on two restricted legislatures, in Colonial India as well as in Pakistan, the gentleman, a former anti-British rebel in his youth and an accomplished writer, counseled me that even a handicapped legislature was, at times, better than no legislature at all! He ← xxi | xxii → encouraged me to study the Pakistan National Assembly even though at that nick of time, it was dwarfed by an undeniable executive dominance. He was glad to receive a copy of my published thesis. What’s more, he told me that he made a proposal to the then Pakistan National Assembly to establish a good research library for reference purposes.
Two important feedbacks on this work are worth mentioning in this Preface for the book’s new edition: When I returned to Dhaka in 1964, I was invited by the local Asiatic Society to make a presentation on my Ph.D. dissertation and I accepted the invitation. In course of my speech, I used the term Muhammadan when talking about the Muslim members of the legislature and the Muslim constituencies were too officially listed as the Muhammadan electorate. Most Muslims were then elected from the separate communally designated seats. One senior Professor of Islamic Studies at the Dhaka University made a serious objection to the use of the term Muhammadan: it was wrong to categorize the Muslims under that banner since they pray to Allah only and not to Prophet Muhammad, he