Gurdwara Bill and councillors
IF the Gurdwara Bill was at all intended to come up before the Punjab Legislative Council in its next session, which commences on May 1, it was but proper that members should have been given sufficient time to study the provisions of this highly important measure. For this purpose, the Legislative Department would have done well to provide authoritative copies of the Bill to members of the Council very soon after it received the Governor General’s assent. As it is, however, it is surprising to learn that until Sunday last, members had not received the copies. Even the copies privately printed and circulated omit the schedules which as Raja Narendra Nath rightly observed to our representative, form “a very important part” of the Bill. Raja Sahib confined his remarks to the observation that from the private copy he had, the Bill appeared to him “to be an improvement in many respects on the previous Bills.” He was not able to say anything further, presumably because he was not in possession of an authoritative copy and had not seen the schedules. There is no doubt that the schedules appended to the Bill, particularly Schedule I, which is stated to contain about 240 names of gurdwaras or shrines, have an especial importance attached to them and members of the Council will find it very difficult to express an opinion on the measure until they have had sufficient time to fully consider the schedules.
