Quotes About Constituent Assembly

No event of any importance in India is complete without a goof-up. In this case, it was relatively minor. When, after the midnight session at the Constituent Assembly, Jawaharlal Nehru went to submit his list of cabinet ministers to the governor general, he handed over an empty envelope. However

I have a lot of hope for the Constituent Assembly.

Economically the perspectives of the Constituent Assembly were entirely liberal: its policy for the peasantry was the enclosure of common lands and the encouragement of rural entrepreneurs, for the working-class, the banning of trade unions, for the small crafts, the abolition of guilds and corporations.

the opponents of the Bolshevik Revolution were poised to command 56 percent of the votes in the Constituent Assembly. The Bolsheviks had exactly 175 of 715 seats—hardly a position from which to dominate the proceedings.27

If power truly comes from the barrel of a gun, to borrow a phrase from a later master of the dual state, Mao Zedong, Lenin still had his finger on the trigger, especially in the capital. His best bet, however, was to defuse the authority of the Constituent Assembly before it even met.

The vote for the Constituent Assembly showed that if a determined leader such as Kerensky or Kornilov decided to rally patriotic feeling across the country, that feeling could turn against the German invader as well as Lenin's Bolshevik accomplices

Lenin had published a crucial article in Pravda entitled "Theses on the Constituent Assembly." It was, as historian Richard Pipes puts it, "a death sentence on the Assembly.

A Bolshevik-sponsored resolution to renounce the Constituent Assembly's legislative powers was voted upon and defeated, with every Bolshevik deputy voting in favor. The Bolsheviks then staged a walkout

The Muslim League won 75 percent of the Muslim vote and all the Muslim seats in the constituent assembly. Only 15 percent of the population had the right to vote on the basis of literacy, property, income, and combatant status. It can be said with some certainty that literate, salaried, and propertied Muslims as well as those who had served in the British army supported the Muslim League. The views of the Muslim peasantry and illiterate masses were less clear.